Re: History question -- Tarski and Codd

In article <3DADE847.44F00720_at_cs.uoregon.edu>, John H. E. Fiskio-Lasseter <johnfl_at_cs.uoregon.edu> wrote:
>
>I'm interested in the knowing the influence of this paper on Codd's
>formulation of relational algebra, as they seem closely related. One
>obvious step is to get copies of Codd's papers, but I'm having a bit of
>trouble tracking them down at the moment.

I've been wondering about that myself. There is for example an interesting article by Jan Van den Bussche on the influence of Tarski's work on database theory:

  http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/443292.html

Even there it is not made clear if Codd knew about Tarski's work or not. A good test would probably be to look up the following article:

  E. F. Codd: Relational Completeness of Data Base Sublanguages. In: R.   Rustin (ed.): Database Systems: 65-98, Prentice Hall and IBM Research   Report RJ 987, San Jose, California : (1972)

There Codd showed that the relational algebra can express 1st order logic. If Codd had known about Tarski's work he would have used (or at least mentioned) Tarski's results on cylindrical algebras and 1st order logic. The article is on the ACM/SIGMOD anthology CDs. (See:

  http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/labs/ibm/RJ987.html)

Unfortunately I don't have the CDs in my room at the moment. However, there is an on-line review of the paper by Chris Date on-line:

 http://www.intelligententerprise.com/db_area/archives/1999/990501/online.shtml

Let me know what you find.

• Jan Hidders