Indeed. You couldn’t store integers because those are decomposable into bits.
Atomicity was always a BS concept, and Chris Date and Hugh Darwen themselves have written as much on this topic. It didn’t help that although Edgar Codd had a math background, a lot of things published on the relational model just didn’t have formal rigor, but people interpreted it as such.
> a lot of things published on the relational model just didn’t have formal rigor, but people interpreted it as such.
I wonder if you may have something that substantiates this claim? I agree that relational theory doesn't look very complicated in principle, and it doesn't seem to be very "productive" as a theory. Compared to group theory, for example.
Yeah, I was thinking about the way how to actually build a non-1NF database. So far my best idea is to store sqlite files as blobs in a different database.
1NF (depending on the definition) has a few subtleties that make it either impossible to avoid in any relational database or almost impossible to enforce!
By impossible to avoid, I mean the basic rectangular shape of a table.
By impossible to enforce, I mean the avoidance of duplicates (without indexes) and NULLs.