databases

• Two phases commit breaks laws of physics.

  — Joe Armstrong

• There is as yet no unified theory of retrieval systems, and a good deal of retrieval practice is still an empirical art, unsullied by theory.

  — Brian Campbell Vickery

• In the digital world, delete does not always delete.

  — Newton Lee

• Relational processing entails treating whole relationships as operands. Its primary purpose is loop-avoidance, an absolute requirement for end users to be productive at all, and a clear productivity booster for application programmers.

  — Edgar F. Codd

• The index of a search engine can be thought of as analogous to the stars in sky.

  — Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto

• Twenty minutes compared to never, that's a lot. Our customer, the Central Intelligence Agency, would get very upset [if] somebody looks in their database.

  — Larry Ellison

• Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely.

  — Vannevar Bush

• The Encyclopoedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk.

  — Vannevar Bush

• A record, if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted.

  — Vannevar Bush

• It is no surprise that attempts such as those of CODASYL and ANSI to develop data structure language (DDL) and data manipulation language (DML) in separate communities have yielded many misunderstandings and incompatibilities.

  — Edgar F. Codd

• Information science is concerned with every aspect of the chain of information transfer activities, but the heart of its interest is information search.

  — Brian Campbell Vickery

• There are certain major mysteries that are magnificent open questions of the greatest import. Some of the things computer scientists study are not. If you’re studying the structure of data-bases—well, sorry to say, that’s not one of the big magnificent questions.

  — Edward Feigenbaum

• Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.

  — Vannevar Bush

• The most important motivation for the research work that resulted in the relational model was the objective of providing a sharp and clear boundary between the logical and physical aspects of database management.

  — Edgar F. Codd