Re: Attribution for modeling data with relations

From: David Cressey <dcressey_at_verizon.net>
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 02:36:09 GMT
Message-ID: <tSsNf.1810$%a2.154@trndny05>

"dawn" <dawnwolthuis_at_gmail.com> wrote in message news:1141232675.124053.15680_at_j33g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

> Does anyone know to whom should we attribute the modeling of data with
> relations?

I had mentioned a year or more ago that some people had used relational math as a basis for "inference engines" before Codd's 1970 paper (and before the 1969 paper that I previously didn't know about, also).

Just starting with the footnotes in Codd's paper, and doing a little searching led me pretty quickly to this:

www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM5947

I think this work, from 1967, predates Codd's vision of the RDM. What is new with codd is the application of the RDM to large shared data banks.

The RDM could have been, and was, implemented on a files system, as I think the above citation shows.
A DBMS could have been, and was, built on some model other than the RDM. Witness IMS. Received on Wed Mar 01 2006 - 20:36:09 CST