This is the paperback version of a hardcover published by Springer back in 2006. The following information about the author is a direct quote from the back cover of the book:

C. J. Date is an independent author, lecturer, researcher, and consultant, specializing in relational database technology (a field he helped pioneer). He is best known for his book, An Introduction to Database Systems (8th edition, 2004), which has sold over 750,000 copies and is used by several hundred colleges and universities worldwide. He is also author of many other books on relational database management, including most recently The Relational Database Dictionary (O’Reilly Media Inc, 2006). He was inducted into the Computing Industry Hall of Fame in 2004.

Since 2006, Date has published several new books on relational database subjects.

In this book, he provides a detailed exposition of the relational database management systems (RDBMS) field by summarizing his theories and those of other like-minded authors, and describes the foundation of this ever-growing technology. The book is divided into seven parts plus an appendix, and ends with an index produced by Date himself.

Part 1 sets the tone of the whole book. Date points out that the state of confusion exists in the database management field due to imprecise thinking by the trade press, software vendors, and developers. He insists that the relational database must be grounded in the logic and theory that he and E. F. Codd developed in the beginning. Unfortunately, most of the implementations of current commercially available RDBMS such as DB2 did not strictly adhere to that theoretical foundation.

Part 2 contains three chapters in which Date demonstrates that the relational model is at heart a formal system based on logic and set theory. Any commercial implementation that deviates from such logic will fail and create confusion due to logical differences that cannot be reconciled.

Date uses the first four chapters of Part 3 to fully define the fundamentals of the relational model and highlight some of the pitfalls that SQL failed to address, which lead to mistakes and difficulties in using that system. The next four chapters in this part go on to more exotic topics such as multiple assignment, data redundancy and database design, data dependencies, and tree structures in the relational model. Chapter 15, “What Not How: The Business Rules Approach to Application Development,” is actually a summary of the book.

Parts 4 to 6 include topics that are important to database professionals, such as the difference between model and implementation, deviations in SQL from the relational model, optimization, relational misconceptions, transaction management, and inheritance.

The last part of the book has four chapters that address the latest developments in relational versus nonrelational systems. The topics include the unified modeling language (UML) and its subset, object constraint language (OCL), and a comparison of the proposal of the Object Data Management Group (ODMG) with the Third Manifesto by Date and Hugh Darwen.

Readers should not miss the appendix, which contains a case study on the role of the trade press in educating the professional community in the RDBMS area. Date concludes that the vast majority of articles and books are misleading and cannot be trusted to provide any enlightenment on this technical subject.

I highly recommend this book to all practitioners in the RDBMS area as a handy reference for the many topics in the design and use of relational models and RDBMS.