Tonight Don Chamberlin will receive a 2009 Fellow Award of the Computer History Museum “for his fundamental work on structured query language (SQL) and database architectures”. The other awardees for 2009 are Robert R. Everett (M.I.T. Whirlwind and SAGE) and Federico Faggin, Marcian (Ted) Hoff, Stanley Mazor and Masatoshi Shima (Intel 4004).
In a recent oral history I conducted for the Computer History Museum, Don put into context his work designing SQL in collaboration with Ray Boyce. Don described the pre-relational database management systems, Ted Codd’s development of the relational model, various implementation projects at IBM culminating in System R, which was the first RDBMS to support SQL. Don went on to describe other pioneering relational systems, including Ingres and Oracle. He also described his subsequent work on text processing, DB/2, and XQuery.
For further historical information about Don and his work, see:
- Burt Grad, Moderator. RDBMS Workshop: Technology Through 1983, Computer History Museum, June 12, 2007. http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/102658267
- Donald D. Chamberlin, OH 329. Oral history interview by Philip L. Frana, 3 October 2001, San Jose, California. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107215
- Paul McJones, editor. The 1995 SQL Reunion: People, Projects, and Politics. Technical Note 1997-018, Systems Research Center, Digital Equipment Corporation, August 1997. https://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/tech_reports/SRC-TN-1997-018.pdf
Update 2018/04/21: updated URL at Charles Babbage Institute.
Update 2023/02/28: updated URLs for 2009 CHM Fellow Awards and SRC-TN-1997-18
Update 2024/05/08: updated URL for SRC-TN-1997-18 again.