CODASYL, the Conference/Committee on Data Systems Languages, was a

consortium A consortium (plural: consortia) is an association of two or more individuals, companies, organizations or governments (or any combination of these entities) with the objective of participating in a common activity or pooling their resources ...

formed in 1959 to guide the development of a standard

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that could be used on many

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s. This effort led to the development of the programming language

COBOL COBOL (; an acronym for "common business-oriented language") is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. It is an imperative, procedural and, since 2002, object-oriented language. COBOL is primarily u ...

, the CODASYL Data Model, and other

technical standard A technical standard is an established norm or requirement for a repeatable technical task which is applied to a common and repeated use of rules, conditions, guidelines or characteristics for products or related processes and production methods, ...

s. CODASYL's

members Member may refer to: * Military jury, referred to as "Members" in military jargon * Element (mathematics), an object that belongs to a mathematical set * In object-oriented programming, a member of a class ** Field (computer science), entries in ...

were individuals from industry and government involved in data processing activity. Its larger goal was to promote more effective data

systems analysis Systems analysis is "the process of studying a procedure or business to identify its goal and purposes and create systems and procedures that will efficiently achieve them". Another view sees system analysis as a problem-solving technique that ...

, design, and

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. The organization published

specifications A specification often refers to a set of documented requirements to be satisfied by a material, design, product, or service. A specification is often a type of technical standard. There are different types of technical or engineering specificat ...

for various languages over the years, handing these over to official standards bodies ( ISO,

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, or their predecessors) for formal

standardization Standardization or standardisation is the process of implementing and developing technical standards based on the consensus of different parties that include firms, users, interest groups, standards organizations and governments. Standardizatio ...

History

CODASYL is remembered almost entirely for two activities: its work on the development of the

language and its activities in standardizing

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interfaces. It also worked on a wide range of other topics, including end-user form interfaces and

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control languages, but these projects had little lasting impact. The remainder of this section is concerned with CODASYL's database activities. In 1965 CODASYL formed a List Processing Task Force. This group was chartered to develop COBOL language extensions for processing collections of records; the name arose because

Charles Bachman Charles William Bachman III (December 11, 1924 – July 13, 2017) was an American computer scientist, who spent his entire career as an industrial researcher, developer, and manager rather than in academia. He was particularly known for his ...

's IDS system (which was the main technical input to the project) managed relationships between records using chains of pointers. In 1967 the group renamed itself the Data Base Task Group (DBTG), and its first report in January 1968 was entitled ''COBOL extensions to handle data bases''. CodasylB

In October 1969 the DBTG published its first language specifications for the network database model which became generally known as the CODASYL Data Model. This specification in fact defined several separate languages: a data definition language (DDL) to define the

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of the database, another DDL to create one or more subschemas defining application views of the database; and a

data manipulation language A data manipulation language (DML) is a computer programming language used for adding (inserting), deleting, and modifying (updating) data in a database. A DML is often a sublanguage of a broader database language such as SQL, with the DML com ...

(DML) defining verbs for embedding in the COBOL programming language to request and update data in the database. Although the work was focused on COBOL, the idea of a host-language independent database was starting to emerge, prompted by IBM's advocacy of

PL/I PL/I (Programming Language One, pronounced and sometimes written PL/1) is a procedural, imperative computer programming language developed and published by IBM. It is designed for scientific, engineering, business and system programming. I ...

as a COBOL replacement. In 1971, largely in response to the need for programming language independence, the work was reorganized: development of the Data Description Language was continued by the Data Description Language Committee, while the COBOL DML was taken over by the COBOL language committee. With hindsight, this split had unfortunate consequences. The two groups never quite managed to synchronize their specifications, leaving vendors to patch up the differences. The inevitable consequence was a lack of interoperability among implementations. A number of vendors implemented database products conforming (roughly) to the DBTG specifications: the best-known implementations were

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's— originally

General Electric General Electric Company (GE) is an American multinational conglomerate founded in 1892, and incorporated in New York state and headquartered in Boston. The company operated in sectors including healthcare, aviation, power, renewable ene ...

's— Integrated Data Store (IDS/2), HP's

IMAGE An image is a visual representation of something. It can be two-dimensional, three-dimensional, or somehow otherwise feed into the visual system to convey information. An image can be an artifact, such as a photograph or other two-dimensio ...

, Cullinet's Integrated Database Management System IDMS, ICL's 2900 IDMS (derived from Cullinet's product),

Univac UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) was a line of electronic digital stored-program computers starting with the products of the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation. Later the name was applied to a division of the Remington Rand company an ...

's DMS-1100, and

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's DBMS for VMS (later known as

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Codasyl DBMS).

Cullinet Cullinet was a software company whose products included the database management system IDMS and the integrated software package Goldengate. In 1989, the company was bought by Computer Associates. Cullinet was headquartered at 400 Blue Hill Dri ...

, originally known as Cullinane Database Systems, obtained the technology from B.F. Goodrich. Cullinet was eventually sold to

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, which as of 2007 still sells and supports a version of IDMS.

and ISO adopted the CODASYL database specifications under the name Network Database Language (NDL), with work taking place within the same working group (X3H2) as SQL standardization. An ISO standard for NDL was ratified as ISO 8907:1987, but, as it never had any practical effect on implementations, it was formally withdrawn in 1998. Some of the CODASYL committees continue their work today, but CODASYL itself no longer exists. The records of CODASYL were donated to the

Charles Babbage Institute The IT History Society (ITHS) is an organization that supports the history and scholarship of information technology by encouraging, fostering, and facilitating archival and historical research. Formerly known as the Charles Babbage Foundation, ...

.See a finding guide t
Conference on Data Systems Languages Records, 1959-1987

, University of Minnesota CBI also hold the archival records for American National Standards Institut
X3H2 records
Interest in CODASYL gradually faded due to growing interest in

relational database A relational database is a (most commonly digital) database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A system used to maintain relational databases is a relational database management system (RDBMS). Many relati ...

s beginning in the early 1980s.

References

External links

Conference on Data Systems Languages Records, 1959-1987

, University of Minnesota. CODASYL was a volunteer organization consisting of individuals from industry and government involved in data-processing activity. The organization was formed in 1959 to guide the development of a standard programming language, which led to the development of

. Collection contains minutes, correspondence, reports, documentation for COBOL, Nice Standard Control Language (NICOLA), the Journal of Development, and other publications from several CODASYL committees and task groups.
Conference on Data Systems Languages Survey Report, 1968
"The CODASYL Systems Committee 1968 Survey of Data Base Systems" lists several dozen database systems surveyed by the group that created the CODASYL database standard.
American National Standards Institute. X3H2 records, 1978-1995

, University of Minnesota. The ANSI X3H2 Committee, formed May 1978, was originally charged with creating a standard for the CODASYL network data model. The resulting NDL (network database language) standard was finished in 1982. The committee work on standardizing the relational data model resulted in the SQL (structured query language) standard in 1984. Citations from CiteSeer
-> {{DEFAULTSORT:Codasyl COBOL Data modeling languages History of software

History

See also

References

Further reading

External links