Edgar F. Codd

Edgar Frank "Ted" Codd
Born	August 23 1923(1923-08-23) Isle of Portland, England
Died	April 18 2003 (aged 79) Williams Island, Florida
Field	Computer Science
Institutions	IBM
Known for	OLAP Relational Model
Notable prizes	Turing Award

Edgar Frank "Ted" Codd (August 23, 1923 – April 18, 2003) was a British computer scientist who made seminal contributions to the theory of relational databases. While working for IBM, he created the relational model for database management. He made other valuable contributions to computer science, but the relational model, a very influential general theory of data management, remains his most memorable achievement.

Biography

Edgar Frank Codd was born on the Isle of Portland, in England. After attending Poole Grammar School, he studied mathematics and chemistry at Exeter College, Oxford, before serving as a pilot in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. In 1948, he moved to New York to work for IBM as a mathematical programmer. In 1953, angered by Senator Joseph McCarthy, Codd moved to Ottawa, Canada. A decade later he returned to the U.S. and received his doctorate in computer science from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Two years later he moved to San Jose, California to work at IBM's Almaden Research Center. In the 1960s and 1970s he worked out his theories of data arrangement, issuing his paper "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks" in 1970, after an internal IBM paper one year earlier. To his disappointment, IBM proved slow to exploit his suggestions until commercial rivals started implementing them. Initially, IBM refused to implement the relational model in order to preserve revenue from IMS/DB. Codd then showed IBM customers the potential of the implementation of its model, and they in turn pressured IBM. Then IBM included in its Future Systems project a System R subproject — but put in charge of it developers who were not thoroughly familiar with Codd's ideas, and isolated the team from Codd. As a result, they did not use Codd's own Alpha language but created a non-relational one, SEQUEL. Even so, SEQUEL was so superior to pre-relational systems that it was copied, based on pre-launch papers presented at conferences, by Larry Ellison in his Oracle Database, which actually reached market before SQL/DS — due to the then-already proprietary status of the original moniker, SEQUEL had been renamed SQL. Codd continued to develop and extend his relational model, sometimes in collaboration with Chris Date. One of the normalized forms, the Boyce-Codd Normal Form, is named after him. As the relational model started to become fashionable in the early 1980s, Codd fought a sometimes bitter campaign to prevent the term being misused by database vendors who had merely added a relational veneer to older technology. As part of this campaign, he published his 12 rules to define what constituted a relational database. His campaign extended to the SQL language, which he regarded as an incorrect implementation of the theory. This made his position in IBM increasingly difficult, so he left to form his own consulting company with Chris Date and others. During the 1990s, his health deteriorated and he ceased work. Edgar Codd coined the term OLAP and wrote the twelve laws of online analytical processing, although these were never truly accepted after it came out that his white paper on the subject was paid for by a software vendor. His last work, a book named The Relational Model for Database Management, version 2, wasn’t so well received. On the other hand, his extension of the ideas in the relational model to cover database design issues, in his RM/T, remains intriguing. Codd also contributed knowledge in the area of cellular automata. Codd received the Turing Award in 1981 and in 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery^[1]. Edgar F. Codd died of heart failure at his home in Williams Island, Florida at the age of 79 on Friday, April 18, 2003.^[2] In 2004, SIGMOD renamed its highest prize, SIGMOD Innovations Award, in his honour.

See also

• Codd's 12 rules
• Codd's cellular automaton
• Database normalization
• Relational Model/Tasmania (RM/T)
• Christopher J. Date
• Hugh Darwen

References

• Codd, E.F. (1970). "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks". Communications of the ACM 13 (6): 377–387.
• Codd, E.F. (1990). The Relational Model for Database Management, Version 2, Addison Wesley Publishing Company. ISBN 0-201-14192-2. 
• National Academy of Sciences (1999). "Chapt. 6: The Rise of Relational Databases", Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research. Washington DC, USA: National Academy Press. 
• Date, C.J. (2000). The Database Relational Model: A Retrospective Review and Analysis: A Historical Account and Assessment of E. F. Codd's Contribution to the Field of Database Technology. Addison Wesley Longman. ISBN 0-201-61294-1. 
• Codd, E.F.; Codd S.B. and Salley C.T. (1993). Providing OLAP to User-Analysts: An IT Mandate. Retrieved on 2007-08-08.

Notes

1. ^ ACM Fellows
2. ^ Edgar F Codd Passes Away, IBM Research, 2003 apr 23.