In 1970, the first relational database model was published by E.F. Codd. A relational database is a program which organizes data records and allows similar attributes of each record to be compared. An example is a collection of personnel records, where the last names or salaries of each person may be listed. Codd's paper, titled "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks," opened a whole new field of database development.
