Rigorous Development of Relational Algebra Can anyone suggest a text that provides a rigorous and modern development of the relational algebra? A chapter out of a rigorous survey text on algebra, for example, would probably be sufficient. In any event, such a treatment may presume (and, ideally, will presume) that basic aspects of algebra such as groups/rings/modules/etc. are familiar. Unfortunately, the only treatments of relational algebra I've been able to find are very elementary and directed at RDBMS programmers.

A nice entry point into the literature on calculus of relations is Roger D. Maddux's The Origin of Relation Algebras in the Development and Axiomatization of the Calculus of Relations. This historical survey will take you from the pioneering work of Pierce and Schröder up to more recent work by Jonsson, Lyndon, Monk, Tarski and others. Chasing references to the works in the bibliography will lead you to more recent work.

Also see Uta Priss' An FCA interpretation of Relation Algebra for (pointers to) connections of relation algebra and the relational algebra in database theory.