The Third Manifesto

by

Hugh Darwen and C.J. Date

CONTENTS:  Welcome;  Reference Material;  Q&A; Related Documents; Forthcoming events; Presentations; Papers; TTM-related projects.

RECENT UPDATES:
18 November 2009: Revised the entry for RAQUEL on the Projects page.
05 October 2009:
Started a second Errata for HD's textbook
An Introduction to Relational Database Theory.  The errors reported in the first Errata have now been corrected.  Many thanks to Erwin Smout for reporting most of those errors.
18 September 2009:
Added Chris Date's
SQL and Relational Theory to the Related Documents section.
20 August 2009:
Added HD's new textbook
An Introduction to Relational Database Theory to the Related Documents section.
01 August 2009:
Added HD's UKOUG presentation of December 2009 to the
Presentations section.  Also the course work exercise that gave rise to it.
17 June 2009:
Revised the entry for Rel on the Projects page.

Welcome to The Third Manifesto (TTM), our proposed foundation for future database systems presented in Databases, Types, and The Relational Model: The Third Manifesto, 3rd edition, Addison-Wesley, 2006 (ISBN:  0-321-39942-0).

The authors are grateful to the 
Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick (UK)
for hosting this web site.

Our aim in the third edition has been to provide a text more suited to university courses, by reducing the polemics, enhancing the tutorial material, and adding exercises to each chapter.  Solutions to the exercises are available to authorized instructors, in softcopy only, at the publisher's Instructor Resource Center.

At this site we publish additional material related to TTM and answer questions that visitors are invited to submit by e-mail.

If you would like to submit a question to Hugh Darwen,

Even better, join our discussion group by clicking here to subscribe, and contribute by clicking here.

Reference Material from 3rd Edition

By permission of our publisher, Pearson Education, we provide here PDF copies of certain material from Databases, Types and The Relational Model for reference purposes.  This material consists of Chapter 4, The Third Manifesto, and the complete official definition of Tutorial D: The description in Chapter 5, the definitions in Appendix A, and the grammar in alphabetical order of BNF terms in Appendix I.

Caveat lector: These copies have been produced by Hugh Darwen from the final working drafts he received from Chris Date in August, 2005.  Subsequent work on the camera-ready copy for our publisher might have introduced some very minor changes.  In any case, some editing was needed to make them presentable here:

In addition, the pagination is different form that in the book.  Please report any discrepancies, or errors arising from the editing mentioned above, .

Questions and Answers
1. From Sólmundur Jónsson, 15 July, 2003, on HD's  "How to Handle Missing Information without Using Nulls"

2. Not a question, but a critique from Maurice Gittens, and Hugh Darwen's response.

3. From Mark Friedenbach, 30 May, 2005, on inheritance of update operators.

4. A critique of the third edition from Maurice Gittens, and the first four instalments of a response by Chris Date and Hugh Darwen.  The files are from the web site of Database Magazine, where edited versions of these articles were published in Dutch.

Related Documents

Papers   
Presentations and course material
Errata in Foundation for Future Database Systems, 2nd edition

Errata in Databases, Types, and The Relational Model, 3rd edition, 1st and 2nd printings 

Errata in Databases, Types, and The Relational Model, 3rd edition, 3rd printing

List of projects
Chapter 4 (TTM)
Chapter 13 (Inheritance Model)
Tutorial D LALR(1) grammar from Ĺke Persson, updated for 3rd edition
Another Tutorial D grammar for 3rd edition, in HTML from Jonathan Leffler
Plain text version of Leffler's grammar for 3rd edition
Temporal Data and the Relational Model by C.J. Date, Hugh Darwen and Nikos A. Lorentzos (Morgan Kauffman, 2003)
The Relational Database Dictionary, Extended Edition  by C.J. Date (Apress, 2008). 
Logic and Databases by C.J. Date (Trafford, 2007).
SQL and Relational Theory by C.J. Date (O'Reilly 2009)
An Introduction to Relational Database Theory  by Hugh Darwen (free download, PDF, 220+ pages) and here is an Errata for this book

Further discussions related to The Third Manifesto can be found at www.dbdebunk.com, with which we seek to be complementary.  According to its editor and publisher, Fabian Pascal, this is "the web site that sets matters straight by telling the truth about database management. It is the forum for concepts, principles and methods and their practical implications that receive little, incorrect, or no coverage from the trade media and no consideration from vendors and industry pundits. It is dedicated to and intended for MIS professionals, application developers, managers, usersexperienced or novicesacademics and students who think for themselves, want to understand database management, rather than follow the prevailing "cookbook" approach, and who are interested in minimizing the severe costs imposed by mindless technology and marketing fads. The site is focused on database educationas distinct from product-specific trainingand should be, therefore, useful, regardless of which DBMS software is used."

Forthcoming Events

Presentations

The Askew Wall, Hugh Darwen's lecture given annually at several UK universities since 1990.  Background to The Third Manifesto.

The Importance of Column Names, by Hugh Darwen.  For the Ingres Users Association, UK, 06 October, 2003.

Database Constraints - A Woeful State of Affairs, by Hugh Darwen.  For the UK Oracle User Group annual conference, December, 2008.  The background to this presentation was this course work exercise.

How to Handle Missing Information without Using NULL, by Hugh Darwen.  Alternative title, "The Final Null in The Coffin", was considered.  For Warwick University undergrads, 09 May, 2003; Scottish Oracle Users Group, November 2004; Unix SIG of UK Oracle Users Group, 26 May, 2005; UK Oracle Users Group annual conference, November 2005.

Temporal Data and the Relational Model, Hugh Darwen's summary of the book, for Warwick University.

VLDB, Hong Kong, August 2002: Foundation Matters keynote address by C.J. Date

Towards an Agreeable Model of Type Inheritance  staff seminar by Hugh Darwen, given at several UK universities, 2000-2001.

Hugh Darwen's home page at Warwick University, where you can find his course materials.

 

Papers

All for One, One for All by C.J. Date (on relationships and their properties)
Reactions to "A Call to Arms" (an article that made our knees jerk)
Towards an Agreeable Model of Type Inheritance by Hugh Darwen
An Overview and Analysis of TSQL2 by Hugh Darwen and C.J. Date
How To Handle Missing Information Using S-by-C  by Hugh Darwen and Erwin Smout (review draft)
Multirelations  by Hugh Darwen (review draft)
 

Four related papers by C.J. Date:

A Discussion of Certain Criticisms of The Third Manifesto  (introduces the next three)
Gödel, Russell, Codd: A Recursive Golden Crowd 
And Now for Something Completely Computational 
To Be Is to Be a Value of a Variable 

                 

© Hugh Darwen, C.J. Date 2009

Date last modified: 18 November, 2009