relational-model

Andy Pavlo opens CMU’s database systems course with a claim that reframes most of what practitioners argue about online: the problems are not new. The hardware changed; the problems didn’t. This week’s Classic of the Week is his Lecture 1 — course information plus a compressed history of database systems from the 1960s to the present. It’s the single best hour for understanding why databases look the way they do, and it comes with an implicit warning: if you don’t know this history, you will spend your career re-litigating settled debates....

Weekly Paper Notes — Seminal Paper of the Week. Area: Databases. Author: E. F. Codd (IBM Research Laboratory, San Jose) Published: Communications of the ACM, Vol. 13, No. 6, June 1970, pp. 377–387 DOI: 10.1145/362384.362685 Why the paper still matters Codd’s paper is eight pages long, contains no system, no benchmark, and no evaluation section. It would very likely struggle to get past a modern program committee. It is also, by a wide margin, the most economically consequential paper in the history of computer science — the entire relational database industry, SQL, the query optimizer as a discipline, and by extension most of what we call “data infrastructure” descend from it....