E.F. Codd's 1970 paper "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks" is one of the most consequential technical documents ever written.

The core idea: represent data as **relations** (tables), not as hierarchies or networks. Operations on relations always produce relations. The interface is declarative — describe *what* you want, not *how* to get it.

Fifty years later, SQL is still the dominant query language. The model was right.

See: [[@bob/programming/sqlite-is-underrated]]