Hey guys,

I was wondering if you guys could help me with some historical notes I'd
like to clear up before I put them in my first week PPTs. I don't toss
anything in my PPTs unless I have a proper reference, yet sometimes even
seemingly proper references can't seem to agree with each other!

Thanks,
Josh

For example,

QUESTION #1: About Dr. Codd's education...

ANWSER (Wikipedia): Computer Science, no year specified

ANSWER (IBM): Computer Science, in 1967
http://www.research.ibm.com/resource...passaway.shtml)

ANSWER (Michigan University): Computer Science, in 1965
https://www.eecs.umich.edu/eecs/alum...ials/Codd.html

ANSWER (Chris Date): Communication Sciences, no year specified
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=959060.959061

ANSWER (Edgar F. Codd): Communication Sciences, no year specified
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=SERIES11430.77708
&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=42976063&CFTOKEN=93049469

So, was it a PhD in Computer Science or Communication Sciences? And was
it in 1965 or 1967?

QUESTION #2: About the creators of SEQUEL...

ANSWER (SQL Essentials, Chapter 1):
"Dr. E.F. Codd, the IBM researcher described such a language, calling it
Structured English QUEry Language (or SEQUEL). Later the name was
shortened to just Structured Query Language (SQL)."
SOURCE: http://www.fbeedle.com/029-6.html

ANSWER (IBM):
Donald Chamberlin and Raymond Boyce.
SOURCE: http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/people...equel-1974.pdf

So did Codd really describe and coin SEQUEL?

howfie wrote:
No references, but I'd say a revealing point is that his first or second
degree was in mathematics, before there was any such thing as a
mainstream cs degree, in the late 1940's after he got out of the RAF.
So he came along very soon after the very early electronic computing
pioneers and had already put in half a career before he put out his
first relational paper. I believe he was doing various operating system
designs for IBM nearly ten years before the integreted circuit was even
invented, on some stretching-the-boundaries machines (one of them was
actually called STRETCH). This background makes his achievement
especially remarkable being that he had one of a very few minds that
were able to escape the physical fetters to imagine not just an
abstraction but a useful one that could be implemented. Obviously he
was hip to logic long before 1965 it was rather daring of him to meld
the logic and set theory (Date claims that by doing this, Codd
essentially invented a new branch of mathematics). On the practical
side, he saw that the geometric storage and iteration of digitalo
machines were very amenable the regularity of uniform sets and a
minimal logic. He suggested implementations based on 'arrays'. Today,
people call this 'image-based' and sometimes disparage it, often without
showing anything better, ie., more practical.


I have heard more than one IBM insider from the early 1970's talk about
how Codd, not just his idea, was personally targeted by the powerful
marketing factions of his own employer who saw his ideas as a threat to
the hardware profits they believed were helped by the hierarchical db's
they were pushing then (IMS and VANDL). One second-hand story is that
the attacks and other mischief were vicious enough to cause a mild
stroke. For sure, even fifteen years after his first paper, most IBM
customers were kept in the dark about the relational idea, most had not
even heard of it and IBM salesmen were pushed the hierarchical products
exclusively. (This myopia probably created the opportunity for the
early versions of Oracle.)


It's also pretty clear that he avoided the System R team that invented
Sequel/SQL (his name wasn't on any of the many papers I remember
seeing), I guess only people who knew him could say whether he shunned
them because he thought they were making too many mistakes or whether he
left them alone because he thought they were doing a fine job!


Somewhere on the web, there is an amusing caricature of a brilliant
recluse who reduces massive programs or queries thought to be
unanswerable by conventional systems to one liners, but he had other
practical talents. He knew that he needed to coin distinct terms to
describe what many thought was too radical or too academic. This is a
talent in itself, which can help distinguishe an idea and get it off the
ground, but one which many inventors don't possess. The common CS usage
of the very word 'relational' came from Codd. I read an interview of
Codd from the early 1990's in a trade mag called DBMS where he recounted
coming up with the term 'normalization'. He said it occurred to him to
use the word when Kissinger and Nixon of the US were 'normalizing
relations' with China. I saw where Date said this wasn't so, but I
assume Date didn't read that magazine (knowing what I know now, I don't
blame him for not reading it!). I'd say his invention of the very terms
is more important than the source of the SQL acronym.

He started in Math and did some nice things on self-reproducing
automata before RM. Those papers might be on the Web.

That was Don Chamberlain and and crew. But Codd did have a proposed
language called "Alpha" that was to relational algebra as FORTRAN was
to algebra.