Donald D. Chamberlin is an American computer scientist 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, b ...

. 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 of ...

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 popu ...

. After attending Campbell High School, he studied engineering at Harvey Mudd College from where he holds a BS. After graduating, he went to Stanford University 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 ...

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 or ...

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 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 achiev ...

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 operat ...

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 "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 b ...

for his work on System R.

Current work

Donald Chamberlin joined Couchbase, Inc. as Technical Advisor in 2015.http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/potmsearch/detail/submission/5279522/Donald_D_Chamberlin
/ref>

Bibliography

He is the author of two books on IBM's DB2 UDB, 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 Computer History Museum.

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)