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A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks Alive

A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks
KindPaper
Published1970
StatusAlive
AuthorsEdgar F. Codd
FieldDatabases
Sourcedl.acm.org ↗

Eleven pages that created an industry — relations, normal form, declarative access. IBM took years to act; Oracle acted first. Every database since is this paper's footnote.

Created by Edgar F. Codd

Codd, an IBM mathematician, published internally in 1969 and publicly in CACM in June 1970. The model: data as relations (sets of tuples), queried declaratively, independent of physical storage — a direct attack on the navigational CODASYL databases then dominant.

IBM's System R and Berkeley's Ingres (both mid-70s) proved it implementable; Oracle shipped the first commercial SQL in 1979 — beating IBM to market with IBM's own research. The relational model now underlies essentially all structured data storage, and Codd won the 1981 Turing Award.

Sources

  1. dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/362384.362685
  2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_model
  3. seas.upenn.edu/~zives/03f/cis550/codd.pdf