Codd's Relational Database Work To Proceed With Delta

Last week, Codd's widow, Sharon, said she is working on a new relational enterprise management system that will translate business knowledge described by business professionals into working applications.

Codd announced her plans during the Eighth Annual CRN Industry Hall of Fame Awards in Mountain View, Calif. Her late husband, a longtime IBM researcher, was inducted for his work on the relational model of data that is the basis for modern databases from IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and other major software vendors.

Codd is forming an as-yet-unnamed company to develop the so-called Delta product. The idea is to enable business analysts to build applications by describing the processes they need performed to a system, which in turn will code the process.

"Data has to be managed, and there are business processes that took the form of applications written in Cobol or using PeopleSoft or Oracle or some other toolkit. This [product is] more abstracted so someone who knows the business rather than someone who knows programming can describe it to the system, which then programs it," Codd told CRN. Like her husband, Codd was a longtime IBMer.

"With a Delta-based system, you can tell it how the business runs, what conditions arise [and] what happens when they are evaluated to be true and the system deals with it," she said.

There will be a graphical interface that would safeguard against rookie mistakes as well as an internal command language that would ensure extensibility and be orthogonal, meaning there is only one way to perform a task, she said. "Graphical interfaces as they exist typically give people too many ways to do something and that gets them into trouble," Codd said. Although the system is in its infancy--Codd is currently seeking funding--she maintained it could help ease offshoring concerns.

"It will bring back work from overseas by letting the person who knows the business declare the processes to the system so some guy in India who doesn't know anything but gets a flow chart won't have to [declare the processes]."

This is a personal quest for Codd, who said she is determined to fulfill her late husband's wish to bring this product to market. Besides the relational model of data, Dr. Edgar F. Codd also pioneered Online Analytical Processing.

In accepting her husband's award at the event, she relayed some of the difficulties he had getting his ideas accepted at IBM. At the time he first espoused the relational model, IBM was pushing hierarchical databases.

Her husband, she told attendees, was 10 to 15 years ahead of the industry and "certainly 15 years ahead of IBM," she said to laughter. "Sorry about that, but what's true is true."

In 2003, more than $7 billion worth of new relational database management system licenses were sold worldwide, according to research firm Gartner.