Donald D. Chamberlin is an American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

who is one of the principal designers of the original SQL language specification with Raymond Boyce. He also made significant contributions to the development of

XQuery XQuery (XML Query) is a query and functional programming language that queries and transforms collections of structured and unstructured data, usually in the form of XML, text and with vendor-specific extensions for other data formats (JSON, bin ...

. Chamberlin was elected a member of the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy ...

in 1997 for contributions to the SQL database query language.

Biography

Donald D. Chamberlin was born in

San Jose, California San Jose, officially San José (; ; ), is a major city in the U.S. state of California that is the cultural, financial, and political center of Silicon Valley and largest city in Northern California by both population and area. With a 2020 popul ...

. After attending Campbell High School, he studied engineering at

Harvey Mudd College Harvey Mudd College (HMC) is a private college in Claremont, California, focused on science and engineering. It is part of the Claremont Colleges, which share adjoining campus grounds and resources. The college enrolls 902 undergraduate students ...

from where he holds a BS. After graduating, he went to

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

on a

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...

grant. At Stanford, he studied electrical engineering and minored in computer science. Chamberlin holds an MSc and a PhD degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University. After graduating, Chamberlin went to work for

IBM Research IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 170 countries. IBM Research is the largest industrial research org ...

at the

Yorktown Heights Yorktown Heights is a census-designated place (CDP) in the town of Yorktown in Westchester County, New York, United States. The population was 1,781 at the 2010 census. History Yorktown Heights is in the town of Yorktown, New York, in northern ...

research facility in New York, where he had previously had a summer internship. Chamberlin is best known as co-inventor of SQL (Structured Query Language), the world's most widely used database language. Developed in the mid-1970s by Chamberlin and Raymond Boyce, SQL was the first commercially successful language for relational databases. Chamberlin also was one of the managers of IBM's System R project, which produced the first SQL implementation and developed much of IBM's relational database technology. System R, together with the

Ingres Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres ( , ; 29 August 1780 – 14 January 1867) was a French Neoclassicism, Neoclassical Painting, painter. Ingres was profoundly influenced by past artistic traditions and aspired to become the guardian of academic ...

project at U.C. Berkeley, received the ACM Software System Award in 1988. Until his retirement in 2009, he was based at the

Almaden Research Center IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 170 countries. IBM Research is the largest industrial research org ...

. He was appointed an

IBM Fellow An IBM Fellow is an appointed position at IBM made by IBM's CEO. Typically only four to nine (eleven in 2014) IBM Fellows are appointed each year, in May or June. Fellow is the highest honor a scientist, engineer, or programmer at IBM can achie ...

in 2003. In 2000, jointly with Jonathan Robie and Daniela Florescu, he drafted a proposal for an XML query language called Quilt. Many ideas from this proposal found their way into the

language specification, which was developed by

W3C The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working to ...

with Chamberlin as an editor.

became a W3C Recommendation in January 2007. Chamberlin is also an ACM Fellow,

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

Fellow, and a member of the

. In 2005, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the

University of Zurich The University of Zürich (UZH, german: Universität Zürich) is a public research university located in the city of Zürich, Switzerland. It is the largest university in Switzerland, with its 28,000 enrolled students. It was founded in 1833 f ...

. In 2009, he was made a Fellow of the

Computer History Museum The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a museum of computer history, located in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the information age, and explores the computing revolution and its impact on ...

"for his fundamental work on structured query language (SQL) and database architectures."

Research

In 1988, Chamberlin was awarded the

ACM Software Systems Award The ACM Software System Award is an annual award that honors people or an organization "for developing a software system that has had a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts, in commercial acceptance, or both". It is awarded by ...

for his work on System R.

Current work

Donald Chamberlin joined

Couchbase, Inc. Couchbase, Inc. is an American public (NASDAQ symbol BASE) software company that develops and provides commercial packages and support for Couchbase Server and Couchbase Lite both of which are open-source, NoSQL, multi-model, document-orient ...

as Technical Advisor in 2015.http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/potmsearch/detail/submission/5279522/Donald_D_Chamberlin
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Bibliography

He is the author of two books on IBM's

DB2 UDB Db2 is a family of data management products, including database servers, developed by IBM. It initially supported the relational model, but was extended to support object–relational features and non-relational structures like JSON a ...

, and more than 50 technical papers. He contributed a chapter (and the cover photograph) to the 2003 book ''XQuery from the Experts'', . He contributed a chapter titled ''Sharing Our Planet'' to the 1997 book ''Beyond Calculation: the Next Fifty Years of Computing'', . He has also contributed problems and served as a judge for the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest for seventeen consecutive years (1998–2014). He is the author of the book ''SQL++ For SQL Users: A Tutorial'', .

External links

Chamberlin's bio at IBM Research

Oral history interview with Donald Chamberlin, dated October 2001
Archived at

Charles Babbage Institute The IT History Society (ITHS) is an organization that supports the history and scholarship of information technology by encouraging, fostering, and facilitating archival and historical research. Formerly known as the Charles Babbage Foundation, ...

.
Oral history interview with Donald Chamberlin, dated July 2009
Archived at

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Chamberlin, Donald D Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Harvey Mudd College alumni IBM employees IBM Fellows Stanford University School of Engineering alumni Database researchers People from San Jose, California Living people Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Year of birth missing (living people)