Raymond F. Boyce

Raymond F. "Ray" Boyce (* 1947 ; † June 1974 in San José , California ) was an American database theorist who conducted research in the field of relational databases in the 1970s .

Boyce received his doctorate in computer science from Purdue University under MH Halstead in 1972 ( Topological reorganization as an aid to program simplification ). He then worked at IBM at its Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights. Together with Edgar Codd he worked on the theory of relational databases and developed the Boyce-Codd normal form (BCNF) named after him and Codd , about which Codd published in 1974. Together with Donald D. Chamberlin , he was also involved in the System R project and thus in the database language SEQUEL as the forerunner of SQL . Work began in 1973 at the IBM Research Center in San José, where Boyce, Chamberlin and other IBM scientists from Yorktown Heights moved for this purpose. After only two years of research, he suddenly died in 1974 of a cerebral haemorrhage ( aneurysm ) shortly after the publication of the article on Sequel with Chamberlin, leaving behind a wife and a nine-month-old daughter.

Fonts

• Donald D. Chamberlin , RF Boyce: SEQUEL: A Structured English Query Language (PDF; 587 kB). In: Proc. ACM SIGMOD Workshop on Data Description, Access and Control, Ann Arbor, Michigan . May 1974, pp. 249-264.

Web links

• The 1995 SQL Reunion: People, Projects, and Politics (early history of SQL)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ben Shneiderman (Ed.): Database management systems. AFIPS, Montwale (NJ) 1976, p. 3.
2. ↑ PhD students at Purdue University ( Memento of the original from September 27, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
3. ↑ Chamberlin SQL in Federico Biancuzzi, Shane Warden (Ed.) Visionaries of Programming , O'Reilly 2009