Best of 2024: 50 Years of SQL with Don Chamberlin, Computer Scientist and Co-Inventor of SQL

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Dec 26, 2024

Don Chamberlin, a renowned computer scientist and co-inventor of SQL, takes listeners through a fascinating journey of SQL's origins and evolution. He discusses the pivotal research at IBM that brought SQL to life and its standardization process by 1986. Chamberlin highlights the competitive early days of relational databases, touching on Oracle's role, and explores the rise of NoSQL and SQL++ as modern advancements. He reflects on SQL's enduring impact and stability in tech, wrapping up with insights into its future in the data landscape.

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INSIGHT

SQL's Design Goals

Chamberlin and Boyce aimed to create SQL for casual users, prioritizing simplicity and readability.
Their goals included using plain English words, avoiding special symbols, and ensuring easy comprehension.

ANECDOTE

SQL Learnability Study

Psychologist Phyllis Reister's experiment showed college students could learn SQL quickly.
The most common error was forgetting quotes around strings, a persistent issue in programming.

ANECDOTE

SQL's Public Debut

The first SQL paper was published at SIGFIDET (now SIGMOD) in 1974.
A debate between Ted Codd and Charlie Bachman at the conference solidified the relational approach's dominance.

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As we look back at 2024, we're highlighting some of our favourite episodes of the year, and with 100 of them to choose from, it wasn't easy!

The four guests we'll be recapping with are:

Lea Pica - A celebrity in the data storytelling and visualisation space. Richie and Lea cover the full picture of data presentation, how to understand your audience, how to leverage hollywood storytelling and more. Out December 19.
Alex Banks - Founder of Sunday Signal. Adel and Alex cover Alex’s journey into AI and what led him to create Sunday Signal, the potential of AI, prompt engineering at its most basic level, chain of thought prompting, the future of LLMs and more. Out December 23.
Don Chamberlin - The renowned co-inventor of SQL. Richie and Don explore the early development of SQL, how it became standardized, the future of SQL through NoSQL and SQL++ and more. Out December 26.
Tom Tunguz - general Partner at Theory Ventures, a $235m VC firm. Richie and Tom explore trends in generative AI, cloud+local hybrid workflows, data security, the future of business intelligence and data analytics, AI in the corporate sector and more. Out December 30.

For our 200th episode, we bring you a special guest and taking a walk down memory lane—to the creation and development of one of the most popular programming languages in the world.

Don Chamberlin is renowned as the co-inventor of SQL (Structured Query Language), the predominant database language globally, which he developed with Raymond Boyce in the mid-1970s. Chamberlin's professional career began at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York, following a summer internship there during his academic years. His work on IBM's System R project led to the first SQL implementation and significantly advanced IBM’s relational database technology. His contributions were recognized when he was made an IBM Fellow in 2003 and later a Fellow of the Computer History Museum in 2009 for his pioneering work on SQL and database architectures. Chamberlin also contributed to the development of XQuery, an XML query language, as part of the W3C, which became a W3C Recommendation in January 2007. Additionally, he holds fellowships with ACM and IEEE and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

In the episode, Richie and Don explore his early career at IBM and the development of his interest in databases alongside Ray Boyce, the database task group (DBTG), the transition to relational databases and the early development of SQL, the commercialization and adoption of SQL, how it became standardized, how it evolved and spread via open source, the future of SQL through NoSQL and SQL++ and much more.

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