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Father of Database Design
Tribute to Edgar Frank Codd
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
Edgar F. Codd, a mathematician and computer scientist who laid the theoretical foundation for relational
datatabases, the standard method by which information is organized in and retr- ieved from computers, died
on Friday at his home in Williams Island, Fla. He was 79.
The cause was heart failure, said his wife, Sharon B. Codd.
Computers can store vast amounts of data. But before Dr. Codd's work found its way into commercial products,
electronic databases were "completely adhoc and higgledy-piggledy," said Chris Date, a database expert and
former business partner of Dr. Codd's, who was known as Ted.
Dr. Codd's idea, based on mathematical set theory, was to store data in cross-referenced tables, allowing
the information to be presented in multiple permutations. For instance, a user could ask the computer for
a list of all baseball players from both the National League and the American League with batting averages
over .300.
Relational databases now lie at the heart of systems ranging from hospitals' patient records to airline
flights and schedules.
While working as a researcher at the I.B.M. San Jose Research Laboratory in the 1960's and 70's, Dr. Codd
wrote several papers outlining his ideas. To his frustration, I.B.M. largely ignored his work, as the
company was investing heavily at the time in commercializing a different type of database system.
"His approach was not, shall we say, welcomed with open arms at I.B.M.," said Harwood Kolsky, a physicist
who worked with Dr. Codd at I.B.M. in the 1950's and 60's. "It was a revolutionary approach."
It was not until 1978 that Frank T. Cary, then chairman and chief executive of I.B.M., ordered the company
to build a product based on Dr. Codd's ideas. But I.B.M. was beaten to the market by Lawrence J. Ellison,
a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, who used Dr. Codd's papers as the basis of a product around which he built
a start-up company that has since become the Oracle Corporation.
"The sad thing is that Ted never became rich out of his idea," Mr. Date said. "Other people did, but not Ted."
Edgar Frank Codd was born the youngest of seven children in Portland Bill, in Dorset, England, in 1923.
His father was a leather manufacturer, his mother a schoolteacher.
He attended Oxford University on a full scholarship, studying mathematics and chemistry. During World War
II, he was a pilot with the Royal Air Force. In 1948 he moved to New York and, hearing that I.B.M. was hiring
mathematicians, obtained a job there as a researcher.
A few years later, in 1953, angered by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's pursuit of Americans he said had
Communist ties or sympathies, Dr. Codd moved to Ottawa for several years.
After returning to the United States, he began graduate studies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor,
where he received his doctorate in computer science in 1965. In 1967, he moved to California to work in the
I.B.M. San Jose Research Laboratory.
He and his first wife, Elizabeth, were divorced in 1978. In 1990, Dr. Codd married Sharon Weinberg, a
mathematician and I.B.M. colleague.
In 1981, he received the A. M. Turing Award, the highest honor in the computer science field.
Dr. Codd is survived by his wife, of Williams Island; a daughter, Katherine Codd Clark of Palo Alto, Calif.;
three sons, Ronald, of Alamo, Calif., Frank, of Castro Valley, Calif., and David, of Boca Raton, Fla.; and six
grandchildren.
TIP and TRICKS
Turning off the Taskbar
QUESTION:
I have an .mde application running on a windows terminal server system. The users hate the multiple
windows on the task bar so I turned off the 'Windows in taskbar' option but that option seems to work
only for the user that turned off the option. It is still set for everybody else.
I imagine that the option is set for the individual user and not necessarily the MS Access file. I
can't afford to allow users to go in and mess with the options settings. Is there any way to set that
option with code at runtime?
ANSWER:
In a startup form use:
Application.SetOption "ShowWindowsInTaskbar", False
in the OnOpen event.
HTH
Bert-Jan
A useful link on MS Site:
http://support.microsoft.com
/default.aspx?scid=/servicedesks
/fileversion /dllinfo.asp
Go have a look - it was new to me and I was kind of surprised they published this info.
Shamil
continued...
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...more TIP and TRICKS
New ID Autonumber Value
QUESTION:
In thread a couple of months ago there was a solution offered to the problem of determining the
value of an ID Autonumber of a record just added. It was stunning in its simplicity, so of course I
didn't write it down ;-(
Can anyone help?
ANSWER:
Used that solution—SELECT @@ IDENTITY FROM TableName-and it returned the autonumber - like...automagically!
_d
QUESTION:
Dear List,
Given the following is as simple as it looks, can anyone shed any light
on the compile error that it generates?
Option Compare Database
Option Explicit
Private mstr_clubname As String
Private Property Set clubname(ByVal iname As String)<<--error!
set the attribute with the supplied name of the club
Set mstr_clubname = iname
End Property
returns the value of the clubname attribute
Public Property Get clubname() As String
clubname = mstr_clubname
End Property
ANSWER: Part One ....
Property Set is used only for objects. If you are passing in a string,
that string has to be used to instantiate an object, along the lines of:
Set frm = forms(iname)
Here's a sample from help:
Property Set Pen(P As Object)
Assign Pen to object
Set CurrentPen = P
End Property
Charlotte Foust
and...
ANSWER: Part two ....
To expand on Charlotte's explanation. You need to use Property Let instead of Property Set assuming that
you really want to pass in a string. So your example would be:
Private Property Let clubname(ByVal iname As String)
save name of the club
mstr_clubname = iname
End Property
HTH
Bobby
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The Wedding of Susan Geller
Comments by Susan Geller
About Our Name: We decided that we want to have a shared family name. But
neither of us was comfortable with taking the other's last name and to
hyphenate Zeller-Gellerman, or the other way around - well, you can see
how that doesn't exactly flow off your tongue. So we have decided to combine
our names, and with slight modification to each, we have arived at our new
last name - Geller.
For those of you who know who I am, I just wanted to let you know that I
changed my name from Susan Zeller to Susan Geller on 4/27 when I got married.
So, when you see "Geller", don't think typo. I married someone with the last
name of Gellerman and we made up the last name of Geller as a way of having
a shared name. The wedding was awesome and we are in total married bliss.
Thanks to all for the congratulations and good wishes. Preliminary thumbnail
pictures are at www.thegellers.org. Genealogists will most definitely be confused.
I'm the taller of white dress wearers. The other is my oldest niece. And,
the vest wearer is my now husband Chris. In some of the pics, the boy Chris
is with is my nephew. My niece and nephew did an awesome job walking flowers
down the aisle and enjoyed getting to dress up!
Actually, we had a bit of a problem with our name change. In Minnesota,
you can apply for a marriage license in any county regardless of where you
live or where you are going to marry. We applied in Hennepin County
(Minneapolis) because the office was convenient even though we live in
Ramsely County (St. Paul). In Hennepin County you can't change your name
directly on the marriage application. In Ramsey County you can. We found
that out AFTER we got married. So, we have to actually go through the
process Charles describes below to get our names changed. So, legally,
our last names haven't changed yet to Geller - that will take a couple
of months of bureaucracy. But, we call ourselves Geller as of April the 27th.
Susan Geller
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