Edgar F. Codd, an IBM computer pioneer who created the “relational database model” that underlies a $7 billion industry of storing the world’s online business data, died of heart failure at home Friday in Williams Island, Fla. He was 79.
Bank accounts, credit cards, stock trading, travel reservations, online auctions and innumerable other now-routine data transactions all rely on Codd’s model, based on highly abstract and complex mathematical theory.
Before Codd’s landmark research paper in 1970, it was possible to store lots of information — but analyzing it was difficult, requiring lines and lines of code for even simple tasks. His model made it possible to access large amounts of data from small computers, giving businesses and government agencies something they desperately needed: quick and easy access to information. “He had a vision about data that was considered radical at the time,” said computer scientist Don Chamberlin, also of IBM. Larry Ellison of Oracle used Codd’s model to build the first commercially available relational database management system.
As complex and abstract as the math he loved, over the decades Codd retained his British accent, his dry wit and his love of a strong cup of tea, say family members. Codd was the youngest of seven children born to a leather processor and his schoolteacher wife in the remote town of Portland, England. He attended Oxford University on a full scholarship, earning degrees in math and chemistry. Although eligible for a military deferment due to his studies, he chose to fly in search of German U-boats as a captain in the Royal Air Force.
Codd first came to the United States in 1948, at the age of 25. He found work with IBM as a programming mathematician for an early proto-computer that used 12,500 vacuum tubes and filled two floors of a Manhattan office building. In 1953, Codd moved to Canada, frustrated that no one insisted that Sen. Joseph McCarthy produce proof of his charges that Communists were embedded in the U.S. government. While in Canada, he established a computing center for the Canadian guided missile program. He later returned and became a U.S. citizen. In 1965, he earned a doctorate from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
A disappointing job rating from his supervisor in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., spurred Codd to transfer to IBM’s Santa Teresa development laboratories in San Jose.
There he found existing data management systems “seat-of-the-pants, with no theory at all,” he recalled in one interview. “I began reading documentation,” Codd said, “and I was disgusted.”
He proposed a solution that leaned heavily on mathematical logic: the relational model. He believed that all the information in a database should be represented as values in the rows and columns of tables, and that no information should be represented by pointers or connections among records. And he wanted the system, not a person, to process a query, said Chamberlin. But support for the traditional database system within IBM was large, powerful and antagonistic. It was at a meeting of a high-level IBM technical committee that the relational model caught the attention of IBM chairman Frank Cary. IBM subsequently announced SQL/DS, its first relational product, in 1981. DB2, for larger MVS machines, was announced in 1983.
“When he put two and two together, he didn’t think about what they added up to, but what they meant,” said son Ronald Codd, 47, of Alamo. “He had this natural ability to see a situation and reach a conclusion that was a step beyond what people would ordinarily think.” “He was very imaginative,” said daughter Katherine Clark of Palo Alto. For his children’s go-carts, he build a complex maze in the back yard, complete with streets and stop signs.
Codd’s life changed in 1983, when he suffered a serious injury from a fall. After his recovery, he retired from IBM and quit his beloved hobby of recreational flying. But he continued to work until 1999, commuting to his San Jose office at Codd and Date Consulting Group, joined by longtime IBM collaborator Chris Date and mathematician Sharon Weinberg, another IBM colleague, who after 12 years of courtship became Codd’s second wife. “For a while, we had work stations side by side,” she said. “I’d see him staring at his screen, thinking. I’d worry, and say, ‘Breathe, Ted, breathe!’ ” “He’d work like a demon. You could not break his focus,” she said.
Edgar F. Codd
Born: Aug. 23, 1923, in Portland, England
Died: April 18, 2003, in Williams Island, Fla.
Survived by: His wife, Sharon; four children, Katherine Codd Clark of Palo Alto, Ronald E.F. Codd of Alamo, Frank Codd of Castro Valley and David Codd of Boca Raton, Fla.; and six grandchildren.
