View Updating and Relational Theory

preface

Intension extension

Edgar F. Codd

Invented a notion

We now know as views

Now view and base relvar

Exchangeability

Got us all singing

Those view update blues

— Anon

The duke of Ormond took a view yesterday of his troop, and ordered all that had bay or grey horses to change them for black.

—earliest known example (1693) of view updating, quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary from “A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs 1678–1714,” by Narcissus Luttrell (1857)

A little learning is a dangerous thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:

There shallow drafts intoxicate the brain,

And drinking largely sobers us again.

— Alexander Pope