Explanation of what the atomic values represent.
I have gone through the definition of 1NF: "If every attribute of relation is atomic." Pray to tell me what Atomic is.
Atomic values represent Codd's original notion from 1969 that every attribute in each tuple within a relation must comprise a single value and not allow multivalued structures of the kind that are supported in databases equivalent to the CODASYL model.
In modern SQL DBMSs, atomicity is not a problem. SQL tables do not allow multivalued columns, and values are always "atomic."
