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For his fundamental work on structured query language (SQL) and database architectures. |
Don Chamberlin (b. 1944) 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.
Chamberlin is also one of the principal designers of XQuery, a widely-used language for querying XML data sources, and an editor of the W3C language specification for XQuery.
A native of San Jose, California, Chamberlin earned his B.S. in engineering in 1966 at Harvey Mudd College in Southern California and his M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1967 and 1971 at Stanford University. He joined IBM Research at the T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York, in 1971. In 1973, he returned to San Jose and continued his work at IBM's Almaden Research Center, where he was named an IBM Fellow in 2003. In 2009, he was appointed a Regents' Professor at University of California, Santa Cruz.
Chamberlin was named an ACM Fellow in 1994 and an IEEE Fellow in 2007. In 1997, he received the ACM SIGMOD Innovations Award and was elected to National Academy of Engineering. In 2005, he was given an honorary doctorate by the University of Zurich for his work on declarative query languages.
Chamberlin has authored two books and more than 50 technical papers. He has also contributed problems and served as a judge for the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest for twelve consecutive years (1998-2009).