CODASYL (often spelt Codasyl) is an acronym for "Conference on Data Systems Languages". Acronyms, initialisms, and alphabetisms are Abbreviations that are formed using the initial components in a phrase or name This was an IT industry consortium formed in 1959 to guide the development of a standard programming language that could be used on many computers. Information technology ( IT) as defined by the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA is "the study design development implementation support The year 1959 ( MCMLIX) was a Common year starting on Thursday (link will display full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. A programming language is an Artificial language that can be used to write programs which control the behavior of a machine particularly a Computer. This effort led to the development of COBOL. COBOL (ˈkoʊbɒl is one of the oldest programming languages still in active use

CODASYL's members were individuals from industry and government involved in data processing activity. Its larger goal was to promote more effective data systems analysis, design, and implementation. The organization worked on various languages over the years but never actually standardized one. The standardization process was left to ANSI.

The "set", the basic structure of the CODASYL database model. A set consists of one owner record and n member records (these are labeled as "parent" and "child" in the diagram, but the Codasyl terminology is "owner" and "member"). In the above example, we were looking at a basic set which embodies a 1:N (Owner:Member) relationship. ^[1]

In 1965 CODASYL formed a List Processing Task Force. Year 1965 ( MCMLXV) was a Common year starting on Friday (link will display full calendar of the 1965 Gregorian calendar. This group was chartered to develop COBOL language extensions for processing collections of records; the name arose because Charles Bachman's IDS system (which was the main technical input to the project) managed relationships between records using chains of pointers. Charles William Bachman (Dec 11 1924 Manhattan Kansas) is a American Computer scientist, who spent his entire career as an industrial researcher rather than in Integrated Data Store ( IDS) is a Network database largely used by industry for its performance In 1967 the group renamed itself the Data Base Task Group, and its first report in January 1968 was entitled COBOL extensions to handle data bases. Year 1967 ( MCMLXVII) was a Common year starting on Sunday (link will display full calendar of the 1967 Gregorian calendar. Year 1968 ( MCMLXVIII) was a Leap year starting on Monday (link will display full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. In October 1969 the DBTG published its first language specifications for the network database model which became generally known as the Codasyl Data Model. Year 1969 ( MCMLXIX) was a Common year starting on Wednesday (link will display full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. The network model is a Database model conceived as a flexible way of representing objects and their relationships This specification in fact defined several separate languages: a data description language (DDL) to define the schema of the database, another DDL to create one or more subschemas defining application views of the database; and a data manipulation language (DML) defining verbs for embedding in the COBOL programming language to request and update data in the database. A Logical Schema is a Data model of a specific problem domain expressed in terms of a particular data management technology 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 as a COBOL replacement. International Business Machines Corporation abbreviated IBM and nicknamed "Big Blue", is a multinational Computer Technology PL/I ("Programming Language One" ˌpiːˌɛlˈwʌn is an imperative computer Programming language designed for scientific engineering

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. Year 1971 ( MCMLXXI) was a Common year starting on Friday (link will display full calendar of the 1971 Gregorian calendar. 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 most well-known implementations were Honeywell's Integrated Data Store (IDS/2), Cullinet's Integrated Database Management System IDMS, Univac's DMS-1100, and Digital Equipment Corporation's DBMS32. Honeywell ( is a major American multinational conglomerate company that produces a variety of consumer products engineering services and aerospace systems IDMS (Integrated Database Management System is a ( network) CODASYL Database management system first developed at B UNIVAC serves as the catch-all name for the American manufacturers of the lines of mainframe computers by that name which through mergers and acquisitions underwent Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering American company in the Computer industry Cullinet, originally known as Cullinane, obtained the technology from B.F. Goodrich. Cullinet was a Software company whose products included the Database management system IDMS and the Integrated software package Goldengate Goodrich Corporation (formerly the BF Goodrich Company), is an American Aerospace manufacturing company based in Charlotte North Carolina Cullinet was eventually sold to Computer Associates, which as of 2007 still sells and supports a version of IDMS. CA Inc &mdash formerly Computer Associates Inc &mdash is a multinational Computer software corporation headquartered in Islandia New York.

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 and a catalog may be found at their website. The Charles Babbage Institute (also titled the Center for the History of Information Technology) is a research center at the University of Minnesota specializing

Interest in CODASYL gradually faded due to growing interest in relational databases beginning in the early 1980's. A relational database is a Database that groups data using common attributes found in the data set

References

• The Codasyl Approach to Data Base Management. T. William Olle. Wiley, 1978. ISBN 0-471-99579-7.
• The Codasyl Model. J. S. Knowles and D. M. R. Bell, in Databases - Role and Structure, ed. P. M. Stocker, P. M. D. Gray, and M. P. Atkinson, CUP, 1984. ISBN 0-521-25430-2

See also

• Navigational database

External links

• Conference on Data Systems Languages Records, 1959-1987 {CODASYL}. Navigational databases are characterized by the fact that objects in the database are found primarily by following references from other objects Charles Babbage Institute. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Collection contains minutes, correspondence, reports, documentation for Nice Standard Control Language (NICOLA), the Journal of Development, and other publications from several CODASYL committees and task groups.
• American National Standards Institute. X3H2 records, 1978-1995. Charles Babbage Institute. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Collection documents the H2 committee’s development of the NDL and SQL standards as follow-on from CODASYL.