Edgar F. Codd

Edgar Frank " Ted" Codd ( born August 23, 1923 on the Isle of Portland, Dorset, England; † 18 April 2003, Williams Iceland, Florida) was a British mathematician and database theorists.

Life

Codd was the youngest of seven children of a leatherworker and a teacher. He studied at Exeter College, Oxford University mathematics and chemistry. During World War II he was in the Royal Air Force and received flight instruction in the United States. In 1948 he emigrated to this. He was briefly a lecturer in mathematics at the University of Tennessee and worked from 1949 as a mathematical programmer in the New York headquarters of IBM, where he worked first for the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator programmed and then the multitasking concept developed for the IBM 7030 Stretch. In 1965 he made ​​with an IBM grant his doctorate at the University of Michigan and moved in 1967 to the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose.

Codd created in the 1960s and 1970s, the relational model, which is the basis of relational databases, which constitute a standard database technology to this day. He was significantly involved in the development of the system R. It is (in addition to Ingres ), the first prototype of a relational database management system and used the query language SEQUEL ( Structured English Query Language = ) from which emerged the SQL query language. In System R are based the later IBM products SQL / DS and DB2 and Oracle database.

With Raymond F. Boyce Codd developed the Boyce - Codd Normal Form. He also formulated twelve evaluation rules as a list of requirements to an online analytical processing system (OLAP).

In 1984 Codd retired from IBM, and founded with Chris J. Date the Codd and Date Consulting Group, where he worked as a consultant until 1999.

For his ongoing work in the area of databases Codd received the 1981 Turing Award, considered the highest honor in computer science. In 1974 he became a Fellow of the British Computer Society, 1976 IBM Life Fellow.

Codd was married twice and had four children.

Writings

  • A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks. (PDF, 1.40 MB ) 1970.
  • The relational model for database management, version 2, Addison -Wesley Publishing Company, 1990, ISBN 0-201-14192-2
April 18 IBM System R Ingres (database) Alan Perlis Maurice Wilkes James H. Wilkinson John McCarthy (computer scientist) Charles Bachman Donald Knuth Allen Newell Herbert A. Simon Michael O. Rabin Kenneth E. Iverson Stephen Cook Niklaus Wirth Richard M. Karp John Cocke Manuel Blum Amir Pnueli Kristen Nygaard Ron Rivest Adi Shamir E. Allen Emerson Joseph Sifakis Charles P. Thacker Judea Pearl Leslie Lamport Integrated Authority File
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