Relational Roots

In this class, we will discuss the roots of databases by going back to the basics, starting with the original relational model paper, and seeing what happened with an early seminal system. There are two readings:

E.F. Codd. A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks. CACM 13(6), 1970, pp. 377-387. We are reading this paper to see how all of relational databases got started, and to get a good background of what happened.
Donald D. Chamberlin, Morton M. Astrahan, Mike W. Blasgen, Jim Gray, W. Frank King III, Bruce G. Lindsay, Raymond A. Lorie, James W. Mehl, Thomas G. Price, Gianfranco R. Putzolu, Patricia G. Selinger, Mario Schkolnick, Donald R. Slutz, Irving L. Traiger, Bradford W. Wade, Robert A. Yost: A History and Evaluation of System R. Commun. ACM 24(10): 632-646 (1981). We are reading this paper because it tells the history of a seminal system that fully explored Codd's ideas, and it also lays the ground for understanding how System-R is the pre-cursor of the modern query optimizer.

To successfully complete this reading, be ready to write a good response and be prepared for a good in class discussion, I suggest the following strategy:

For Codd's paper, don't worry about making sure that you have the full details of the proposal understood. Instead, concentrate on making sure that you understand his motivations for what he has proposed, and how that helped, and perhaps some things that he may have underestimated. Also note how things have changed since the original proposal, including the basic data model, and what are considered the important query language building blocks.
For the System-R paper, read the rest of the paper, but only skim section 4, to get an idea of what types of evaluation methods were used. Don't bother reading over all of the details in section 4.

If you're interested in more about the more gossipy side of System-R, you can check it out here

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Rachel Pottinger
E-mail Address: rap [at] cs [dot] ubc [dot] ca

Office Location: CICSR 345
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