E.F. Codd's 'A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks' paper

E.F. Codd's groundbreaking paper introduced the relational model, providing a robust mathematical framework for organizing and querying data, which became the theoretical bedrock for future database systems, including distributed ones.

Significance

While not directly about distributed databases, this paper revolutionized database design and provided the necessary logical abstraction upon which distributed relational systems would later be built.