Re: History of 1NF

On Mar 12, 5:19 pm, Marshall <marshall.spi..._at_gmail.com> wrote:
> Back in the day, Codd originally defined First Normal Form
> (or maybe he was just calling it Normal Form back then)
> and proved something about it. Something about an
> isomorphism between nested relations and unnested
> relations? Could someone state specifically what he
> proved, please? And if anyone has a reference, that'd
> be good too.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Marshall

I'm afraid I don't have links for you, but I doubt that anything was strictly proven - Codd's initial publications were example driven (and rightly so, given he was attempting to lead people out of a status quo at the time). But also, has it not been shown that some boundary cases do require nested relations to model? (but I'd need to hit the acm portal to check that).

My intuition is (as in its a complete guess) that Codd, as a mathematician, started with the notion of using relational theory, and aware of the previous work on "conjunctive" and "disjunctive normal forms", harnessed their conceptual basis and terminology to apply to propositions. The clever sausage. Regards, J. Received on Thu Mar 13 2008 - 13:50:09 CET