Codd, Edgar Frank

Edgar Frank Codd, (born August 19, 1923, Portland, Dorset, England—died April 18, 2003, Williams Island, Florida, U.S.), British-born American computer scientist and mathematician who devised the “relational” data model, which led to the creation of the relational database, a standard method of retrieving and storing computer data.

Codd interrupted his study of mathematics and chemistry at the University of Oxford to become a pilot in the Royal Air Force during World War II. Following graduation in 1948 he moved to the United States, and he later became a U.S. citizen.

Codd joined IBM in 1949 and worked as a mathematical programmer on some of the company’s early computers. He invented the technique of multitasking, which allows several programs to run at once. In 1967, after receiving a doctorate in computer science (one of the first degrees for the study of cellular automata) from the University of Michigan, Codd moved to IBM’s Research Laboratory in San Jose, California.

In 1970 Codd published his seminal paper “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks,” which described a new way of structuring data using ideas from set theory that eliminated the need for knowledge about the internal structure of a database. Although IBM researchers Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce developed SEQUEL, later named Structured Query Language (SQL), in the early 1970s, the company was slow to market the relational database system, which only the most advanced computers of the time were capable of running. Meanwhile, Codd’s ideas were put into practice by several new companies founded in or around Silicon Valley, including Oracle Corporation, Informix Corporation, and Sybase Inc., before IBM introduced its SQL/DS in 1981. In 1983 SQL/DS was renamed DB2, and it remained IBM’s main database management system (DBMS) into the 21st century.

Codd was honoured for his achievements by the Association of Computing Machinery, the British Computer Society, the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. In 1981 Codd received the A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour for computer science.