Database Design for Mere Mortals™: A Hands-On Guide to Relational Database Design, Second Edition

The Relational Database Model

The relational database was first conceived in 1969 and has arguably become the most widely used database model in database management today. The father of the relational model, Dr. Edgar F. Codd, was an IBM research scientist in the late 1960s and was at that time looking into new ways to handle large amounts of data. His dissatisfaction with the database models and database products of the time led him to begin thinking of ways to apply the disciplines and structures of mathematics to solve the myriad of problems he had been encountering. Being a mathematician by profession, he strongly believed that he could apply specific branches of mathematics to solve problems, such as data redundancy, weak data integrity, ...