David Portas (7/12/2010)
It is included in the disc version of the ACM SIGMOD anthology, although I don't think the text is available online.http://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/conf/icde/Codd86.html
That's the rebublished version of the Computerworld article.
The 13 "rules" are still useful discussion points for students I suppose. I'm not sure how important it is to be precise about the original text however. They are definitely not a formal definition of the relational model. Rather they are some potentially interesting observations about some properties of DBMSs. The article is also strong in its criticisms of SQL and the SQL standard's failure to support the relational model. Yet the rules are frequently quoted in a SQL context while Codd's remarks opposing SQL are never mentioned!
The science and understanding of the relational model has developed since 1985 and there are other texts that I think cover the same material better. Read Codd by all means, but also read David Maier, Date, Darwen and the Alice Book (Abiteboul).
Heh... thanks for the response, David, but it's actually not up to you as to whether I think or will think the 13 rules are "a formal definition" definition or not especially when so many people cite them to explain why SQL Server (SQL in general, really) is not truly an RDBMS. And, yes, I believe it to be very important to explore the original text just as it might be if one were exploring the "Agile Manifesto" and for the same reasons... too many people have put their own slant on things and I'd love to have the opportunity to judge for myself. The only way I can do that is to study the original wording of the original (or true facsimile of) document. And, yeah... I'd like to study the whole document and not just the 13 rules.
I appreciate your suggested reading list but those folks aren't Codd. As I said, a lot of folks use Codds rules and his supposed quotes and I'd like to see just how accurate those people are as well as having the opportunity to make up my own mind about what Codd actually stated.
{edit} Crud... the site you referenced wants to download to a CD and I won't have access to a computer that has a burnable CD or DVD for at least another week. I hope someone else can come up with a facsimile of the original document but, if they don't, I'll do the download next week. Thanks for the leg up, David.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.