The relational mistake

If you’ve ever wondered what killed 4GLs the answer is a mistake - one that permeates almost everything in IT from about 1969 through to today. Codd’s relational model wasn’t designed as a solution to data storage problems, it was designed to address application stovepiping and used common data storage as the methodology for doing that. Codd called his model “relational” because he’d used textbooks written using British English while in school - textbooks in which what we call set theory is labeled the theory of relations. Unfortunately most data processing professionals were and are familiar with the entity relationship models used in heirarchial databases like IMS, so they’re sure they know what relational means - but they’re dead…

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