The Third Manifesto

by

Hugh Darwen and C.J. Date

CONTENTS:  Welcome; Books for sale;  Reference Material;  Q&A; Related Documents and Books; Forthcoming and Recent Events; Presentations; Papers; TTM-related projects.

RECENT UPDATES:

01 May 2012: Added Chris Date's new book on database design and the video based on that book.

21 March 2012: Fixed definition of <attribute> in the Tutorial D grammar.

05 March 2012: Added link for the Lubljana event in Chris Date's forthcoming seminars in Europe.

03 February 2012: Added Chris Date's forthcoming seminars in Europe to the Forthcoming and Recent Events.

06 November 2011: Added scanned images of the very first attempt (by Hugh Darwen) to draft The Third Manifesto, and an account of the events that led to it. 

30 October 2011: Posted TTM revised version dated October 30th, 2011.

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).  Minor revisions to the Manifesto given in Database Explorations (2010) are reproduced here.

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, (you need Java script enabled if you don't see click here after that comma)

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

Books for Sale at Reduced Prices

Chris Date has a few spare copies of his book, Logic and Databases, and of Database Explorations, which he is able to offer for sale at US$25 plus shipment costs.  The normal retail price for both books is US$40.  If you wish place an order, send an email to Hugh Darwen (you need Java script enabled if you don't see click here to after that comma).

For shipment in the USA, Chris Date charges $5  For other parts of the world, shipment costs will be given on request.

The Third Manifesto and Tutorial D (reference material)

The definitions given here are current and supersede all previous versions published in books.

The Third Manifesto, dated October 30th, 2011.
Tutorial D
(Chapter 11 of Database Explorations, minor revisions to appear soon)
Tutorial D grammar in alphabetical order of BNF terms (soon to be slightly revised)
Appendix A (an abstract relational algebra, A, referenced in the definition of Tutorial D)

Reference Material from Database Explorations

Some of the material given here has since been revised and is provided here for historical reference purposes.

Chapter 1, "The Third Manifesto" (no longer current)
Chapter 11, "Tutorial D"
(soon to be slightly revised) 
Abbreviated table of contents, showing the chapter titles and page numbers
Tutorial D
grammar in alphabetical order of BNF terms (soon to be slightly revised)

Errata for 1st printing

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.  Some of this material was revised in Database Explorations and is provided here for historical reference purposes.

Chapter 4, The Third Manifesto  (no longer current)
Tutorial D: The description in Chapter 5  (no longer current)
The definitions in Appendix A (an abstract relational algebra referenced in the definition of Tutorial D)
The grammar in alphabetical order of Tutorial D BNF terms in Appendix I (no longer current).

Caveat lector: These copies were 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 from 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

Books   
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
Errata in Database Explorations, 1st printing

List of projects
Latest version of TTM  (and here is the very first version, with an account of the events that led to its production)
Latest version of Inheritance Model
Tutorial D LALR(1) grammar from Ĺke Persson, based on 3rd edition
Another Tutorial D grammar for 3rd edition, in HTML from Jonathan Leffler
Plain text version of Leffler's grammar for 3rd edition

Forthcoming and Recent Events

Seminars by Chris Date in Europe, May-June 2012:

Chris will be giving his seminar Normal Forms and All That Jazz: A Database Professional’s Guide to the Theory of Database Design at each of the following events:

Wed-Thu May 30-31, at the Finland Oracle User Group Conference: 
Mon-Tue June 4-5, in Lljublana (Slovenia) organized by DbProf d.o.o. in cooperation with SIOUG, Slovenian Oracle User Group
Thu-Fri June 7-8, Edinburgh, The Chris Date Master Class. 

Seminars by Chris Date in New Zealand, March 2012:

SQL and Relational Theory   Mon-Tue March 5-6 in Christchurch, Thu-Fri March 8-9 in Wellington, and Mon-Tue March 12-13 in Auckland. 
Contact: Francisco Munoz Alvarez, mbatec@hotmail.com.

Presentations

2-3 June 2011: Workshop for implementers of The Third Manifesto at the University of Northumbria, Newcastle, England.  Many thanks to David Livingstone for the initiative and organisation.  Further information plus speakers' presentation slides at notes are at the web site. 

Video at O'Reilly: "Database Design and Relational Theory: Normal Forms and All That Jazz", by Chris Date.

Video at O'Reilly: "SQL and Relational Theory", by Chris Date.

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.

 

Books

Database Design and Relational Theory: Normal Forms and All That Jazz by C.J. Date
SQL and Relational Theory: How to Write Accurate SQL Code (O'Reilly Media Inc.) : Second edition by C.J. Date
Go Faster! The TransRelational Approach to DBMS Implementation (Bookboon IT books) by C.J. Date (free download)
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).
An Introduction to Relational Database Theory  by Hugh Darwen (free download, PDF, 220+ pages) and here is an Errata for the April 2010 version of this book (all corrected in February 2011)
Database Explorations by C.J. Date and Hugh Darwen (Trafford, 2010)

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).  This approach is described again and discussed in Chapter 25, "An Inheritance Approach", of Database Explorations, which was published in 2010.
From the same book, Chapter 24, The Multirelational Approach (to the problem of missing information) is a joint effort by Chris Date and Hugh Darwen, based on and now superseding Darwen's 2008 review draft Multirelations.
 

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: 01 May, 2012