Everything about Edgar F Codd totally explained
Edgar Frank "Ted" Codd (
August 23,
1923 –
April 18,
2003) was a
British computer scientist who, while working for
IBM, invented the
relational model for database management, the theoretical basis for
relational databases. 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, where he continued to work until the 1980s. During the 1990s, his health deteriorated and he ceased work.
Codd received the
Turing Award in
1981 and in
1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the
Association for Computing Machinery.
Codd died of
heart failure at his home in
Williams Island, Florida at the age of 79 on Friday, April 18, 2003.
Work
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 didn't 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.
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, have proved important [citationneeded]. Codd also contributed knowledge in the area of
cellular automata.
In 2004,
SIGMOD renamed its highest prize, SIGMOD Innovations Award, in his honor.
Further Information
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