Appendix E. A Guide to Further Reading

I don’t mind your thinking slowly; I mind your publishing faster than you think.

Wolfgang Pauli (attrib.)

There’s a vast literature on relational database technology, and another such on matters related to SQL. This appendix contains an annotated list of publications from these two sources (both books and individual papers or articles) that you might find interesting. Note: I apologize for the number of times my own name appears as either author or coauthor in this list, but given the nature of the material, such a state of affairs is—if you’ll pardon me for saying so—more or less inevitable.

Papers by E. F. Codd

  • “Derivability, Redundancy, and Consistency of Relations Stored in Large Data Banks,” IBM Research Report RJ599 (August 19th, 1969); “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks,” CACM 13, No. 6 (June 1970). Note: The first of these papers was reprinted in ACM SIGMOD Record 38, No. 1 (March 2009); the second was reprinted in Milestones of Research—Selected Papers 1958–1982 (CACM 25th Anniversary Issue), CACM 26, No. 1 (January 1983) and elsewhere.

    The 1969 paper was Codd’s very first paper on the relational model; essentially, it’s a preliminary version of the 1970 paper, with a few interesting differences, the main one being that the 1969 paper permitted relation valued attributes while the 1970 one didn’t. That 1970 paper was the first of Codd’s papers to become widely available. It’s usually credited with being the seminal ...

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