The first section reprints Date's articles from the now defunct Database Programming & Design magazine. They are interesting articles, especially the ones on quota queries.

The next section is entitled Relational Database Management and covers articles on the 25th Anniversary of the Relational Model, and What a Database Really Is, an introduction to The Third Manifesto, and a discusion on units and data types. These are interesting but not revelatory.

The next section is an extension of the diatribe against NULLS in SQL. The four articles or chapters by David McGoveran are extremely interesting, but also pretty tough going. The last two contain some practical advice on how to avoid nulls. The other two chapters in this section are responses by Date and his colleagues to other people's articles discussing the subject. If you've read the other books in this series, there is little new material in them. These are also tough going and although they they *do* make sense without the articles to which they refer, it is much harder to read them than it would be with the articles.

This complaint carries over, redoubled, into the last section, which consists of 5 chapters, three of which are replies to other people's articles about the Object-Domain vs Object-Relation mapping for OODBMS. While I have every sympathy with Date's view that the Object-Domain mapping makes sense, these articles do not stand well on their own when you have not had the opportunity to read the originals (and I haven't).

Overall, this is like the Curate's Egg -- good in parts. I'm not sorry I bought it, but if someone is starting to buy these books by Date, they'd be much better off with the 1989-1991 or 1991-1994 books than with this one.