2 3 R D A U G U S T 1 9 2 3 – 1 8 T H A P R I L 2 0 0 3

EDGAR FRANK CODD

EARLY LIFE

• Born on the 23rd of August 1923 in Portland in Dorsetshire, England, Edgar Frank Codd was better known as Ted Codd.

• He was the youngest of seven with a dad as a leather manufacturer and his mother was a schoolteacher.

• On a full scholarship he studied maths and chemistry at Oxford University before serving as a pilot in the Royal Air Force during World War Two.

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WORK LIFE

• In 1949 Codd moved to America and joined IBM as a mathematical programmer for the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator2, a huge vacuum tube computer used to solve many of the largest scientific problems of its day.

• In 1965 he achieved a doctorate in Computer Science from the University of Michigan.

• His biggest achievement came in 1967 whilst working at IBM’s San Jose Research Laboratory where his research led to the invention of the relational database model.

• For his extensive work he received the highest honour in the Computer Science field known as the A M Turing Award.

• Finally, Codd died of heart failure in Florida on the 18th April 2003 aged 79.

CODD’S RULES

In 1985 Codd published a list of rules that became a standard way of evaluating a relational system. After publishing the original article Codd stated that there are no systems thatwill satisfy every rule. Nevertheless the rules represent the relational ideal and remain a goal for relational database designers.