Note: To appreciate the stability of a sound foundation vs the industry's fad-driven cookbook practice, I am re-publishing some of the articles and reader exchanges from the old DBDebunk.com (2000-06), giving you the opportunity to judge for yourself how well my claims/arguments hold up and whether the industry has progressed at all. I am adding comments on re-publication where necessary. Long pieces are broken into smaller parts for fast reading.
From "Little Relationship to Relational" originally posted on March 29, 2001.
“E.F. ("Ted") Codd conceived of his relational model for databases while working at IBM in 1969. Codd's approach took a clue from first-order predicate logic, the basis of a large number of other mathematical systems and presented itself [sic] in terms of set theory, leaving the physical definition of the data undefined and implementation dependent. In June of 1970, Codd laid down much of his extensive groundwork for the model in his article, "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks" published in the Communications of the ACM, a highly regarded professional journal published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Buoyed by an intense reaction against the ad hoc data models offered by the physically oriented mainframe databases, Codd's rigid separation of the logical model, with its rigorous mathematical underpinnings, from the less elegant realities of hardware engineering was revolutionary in its day. Codd and his relational ideas blazed across the academic computing landscape over the next few years.”
