E. F. Codd and Relational Theory: A Detailed Review and Analysis of Codd’s Major Database Writings

E. F. Codd’s relational model of data has been described as one of the three greatest inventions of all time (the other two being agriculture and the scientific method), and his receipt of the 1981 ACM Turing Award—the top award in computer science—for inventing it was thoroughly deserved. The papers in which Codd first described his model were staggering in their originality; they had, and continue to have, a huge impact on just about every aspect of the way we do business in the world today. And yet few people, even in the professional database community, are truly familiar with those papers. This book is an attempt to remedy this sorry state of affairs. In it, well known author C. J. Date provides a detailed examination of all of Codd’s major technical publications, explaining the nature of his contribution in depth, and in particular highlighting not only the many things he got right but also some of the things he got wrong.