Foundation matters

• Authors: C. J. Date
• Venue: VLDB '02 Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Very Large Data Bases
• Year: 2002

This talk is meant as a wake-up call ... The foundation of the database field is, of course, the relational model. Sad to say, however, there are some in the database community--certainly in industry, and to some extent in academia also--who do not seem to be as familiar with that model as they ought to be; there are others who seem to think it is not very interesting or relevant to the day-today business of earning a living; and there are still others who seem to think all of the foundation-level problems have been solved. Indeed, there seems to be a widespread feeling that "the world has moved on," so to speak, and the relational model as such is somehow passé. In my opinion, nothing could be further from the truth! In this talk, I want to sketch the results of some of my own investigations into database foundations over the past twenty years or so; my aim is to convey some of the excitement and abiding interest that is still to be found in those investigations, with a view--I hope--to inspiring others in the field to become involved in such activities. First of all, almost all of the ideas I will be covering either are part of, or else build on top of, The Third Manifesto [1]. The Third Manifesto is a detailed proposal for the future direction of data and DBMSs. Like Codd's original papers on the relational model, it can be seen as an abstract blueprint for the design of a DBMS and the language interface to such a DBMS. Among many other things: • It shows that the relational model--and I do mean the relational model, not SQL--is a necessary and sufficient foundation on which to build "object/relational" DBMSs (sometimes called universal servers). • It also points out certain blunders that can unfortunately be observed in some of today's products (not to mention the SQL:1999 standard). • And it explores in depth the idea that a relational database, along with the relational operators, is really a logical system and shows how that idea leads to a solution to the view updating problem, among other things.