Raymond F. Boyce

Raymond F. "Ray" Boyce ( * 1947, † June 1974 in San Jose, California ) was an American database theorist who conducted research in the 1970s in the United States in the field of relational databases.

Boyce in 1972 received his doctorate in computer science at Purdue University in MH Halstead ( Topological reorganization as an aid to program simplification ). He then worked for IBM at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights. Together with Edgar Codd worked in the field of the theory of relational databases and developed named after him and Boyce Codd - Codd Normal Form ( BCNF ), what Codd published in 1974. Together with Donald D. Chamberlin, he was also involved in the project System R and thus to the database language SEQUEL as a precursor of SQL. The work began in 1973 at the IBM Research Center in San Jose in California, where Boyce, Chamberlin and other IBM scientists of Yorktown Heights attracted to this purpose. After only two years of research, he died suddenly in 1974 of a cerebral hemorrhage ( aneurysm) shortly after publication of the article on Sequel with Chamberlin and left behind a wife and a nine- month-old daughter.