1973 查理士·巴赫曼

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CHARLES WILLIAM BACHMAN DL Author Profile link
United States – 1973
CITATION
For his outstanding contributions to database technology.

SHORT ANNOTATED
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACM TURING AWARD
LECTURE
RESEARCH
SUBJECTS
ADDITIONAL
MATERIALS
VIDEO INTERVIEW
ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW
By creating the Integrated Data Store (IDS), and advocating forcefully for the concepts behind it, Charles W. Bachman was uniquely influential in establishing the concept of the database management system. During a long and varied career he ran a chemical plant, created cost capital accounting systems, headed an early data processing group, pioneered the application of computers to manufacturing control, led efforts to standardize database and computer communication concepts, won the highest honor in computer science and founded a publicly traded company.

Bachman told me [7] that when he thought about career options as a boy, “I was never interested in anything else. I was always going to be an engineer.” The Second World War temporarily intervened, but in 1950 his dream came true when engineering degrees from Michigan State and the University of Pennsylvania earned him a job with Dow Chemical. An interest in management and cost accounting methods exposed him to punched card machines, and in 1957 he became the founding head of Dow’s corporate data processing department. His work there, and his exposure to other computer center leaders through IBM’s SHARE user group, changed the course of his career.

Business problems led Dow to cancel its computer order prior to delivery. Frustrated, Bachman left Dow in 1960 to work for General Electric, then the textbook example of a well-managed, diversified technology company. He was part of a team responsible for experimenting with new approaches such as operations research, simulation, forecasting, and automation, for possible application across the firm’s many different business units. During the 1950s hundreds of American businesses had rushed to order computers. There was a lot of hype about potential benefits, but getting the machines to do anything useful was much harder than expected. They often ended up being used only to automate narrow clerical tasks like payroll or billing. By 1960 management experts realized that to justify the huge personnel and hardware costs of computerization, companies would need to use computers to tie together business processes such as sales, accounting, and inventory so that managers would have access to integrated, up-to-date information. This was the great dream of corporate computing in the 1960s.

Various firms tried to build such “totally integrated management information systems”, but the hardware and software of the era made that difficult. Each business process ran separately, with its own data files stored on magnetic tape. A small change to one program might mean rewriting related programs across the company. But business needs change constantly, so integration never got very far.

Bachman explains the goals of General Electric’s MIACS project, for which IDS was created.        
At General Electric Bachman was working on just such as “integrated systems” project, and produced the Manufacturing Information and Control System (MIACS) for a GE manufacturing plant in Philadelphia. Using one of the first available disk drives, his team solved the fundamental problems that defeated so many others.

The crucial invention, operational by 1963, was Bachman’s Integrated Data Store or IDS. IDS maintained a single set of shared files on disk, together with the tools to structure and maintain them. Programs responsible for particular tasks, such as billing or inventory updates, retrieved and updated these files by sending requests to IDS. IDS provided application programmers with a set of powerful commands to manipulate data, an early expression of what would soon be called a Data Manipulation Language.

Bachman describes the capabilities of his Integrated Data Store (IDS), the first database management system.        
This made programmers much more productive, because they did not have to grapple with the daunting complexity of working with the “random access” disk storage devices. It also meant that the files could be restructured, moved or expanded without rewriting all the programs that accessed them. IDS maintained a separate data dictionary, tracking information on the different kinds of records in the system and their relationships—for example between customers and the orders they had placed. This was a crucial step towards the integration of different kinds of data, which in turn was vital to the integration of business processes and the establishment of the computer as a managerial tool. Only the boldness of Bachman’s IDS design, and the remarkable efficiency with which he squeezed IDS and the MIACS applications into a computer with the equivalent of 40 Kbytes of memory, made this possible. This tight coupling meant that IDS and the Problem Controller, a transaction scheduling system produced by the same team as an application of IDS, almost entirely replaced General Electric’s rudimentary system software. It was years before any other program matched the power and flexibility of IDS.

Bachman describes the IDS Problem Controller, a transaction scheduling system created as an application of IDS itself. This eliminated the need for a separate operating system.        
By the end of the 1960s the “data base management system,” as programs such as IDS were being called, was one of the most important areas of business computing research and development. When the packaged mainframe software industry boomed during the 1970s, data base management systems were its most important product category. Bachman played an important role in this process, as an early chair and active member of the Database Task Group established by the computer trade association CODASYL (best known as the creator of the COBOL language for business programming) to standardize concepts, terminology and technologies in this area. His design for IDS, and formulation of the underlying concept of the network data model, were the most important influences on the group’s final work.

In 1973 Bachman became the eighth person to win the ACM Turing Award. At that time computer science was a young discipline, and its leaders were struggling to establish it as a respectable academic field with its own areas of theory, rather than as just a technical tool needed to support the work of real scientists such as physicists. So the awards tended to go to brilliant theorists working in prestigious universities. Bachman was the first Turing Award winner without a Ph.D., the first to be trained in engineering rather than science, the first to win for the application of computers to business administration, the first to win for a specific piece of software, and the first who would spend his whole career in industry. Bachman does not believe the award had much impact on his subsequent career progress, although it caused him to develop an interest in Alan Turing’s life and even to visit Sara Turing, Alan Turing’s elderly mother, then in an English nursing home.

His award acceptance lecture, “The Programmer as Navigator,” was an influential declaration of a new world in which complex data structures provided the framework for corporate computing systems, around whose topographies individual application programs would navigate. The award cemented Bachman’s position within the industry as a leading expert on Database Management Systems (DBMS) and the most respected advocate for the network data model and the systems influenced by the CODASYL approach that were rapidly gaining market share in the mainframe world during the mid-1970s.

As such, he stood in opposition to the ideas of Edgar F. (“Ted”) Codd, a mathematically inclined IBM research scientist whose relational model for database manipulation had attracted a growing band of supporters and was beginning to legitimize database systems as a theoretically respectable research field within computer science. A debate between the two and their supporters, held at an ACM workshop in 1974, is remembered among database researchers as a milestone in the development of their field. Bachman stood for engineering pragmatism and proven high performance technology, while Codd personified scientific rigor and elegant but unproven theory. Their debate was inconclusive, which was perhaps inevitable given that no practical relational systems had yet been produced.

Bachman’s influence on today’s data base management systems is unmistakable, even though data base management systems based on Codd’s relational approach, such as Oracle, DB2, and SQL Server, had eclipsed CODASYL systems by the end of the 1990s. Modern relational systems continue to follow the basic template for the data base management system invented by Bachman and his colleagues in CODASYL: a complex piece of software managing data storage, enforcing access restrictions, providing interfaces for both application programs and ad-hoc queries, and providing different views on the same data to different users. Although the rigid connections between different kinds of records that Bachman favored are not part of the relational model itself, pragmatism has pushed modern systems to support them in the form of referential integrity constraints.

Today’s database designers rely on graphical tools to depict the relationships between different tables as a web of connections. These “data structure diagrams” are the direct descendants of a technique Bachman devised [3] to illustrate the complex data structures required for the adaptive manufacturing control logic of MIACS.

Bachman helped guide two highly influential committees during the 1970s. The Study Group – Database Systems was set up in 1972 by the Systems Planning and Resources Committee (SPARC) of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). Its distinction between conceptual, internal, and external schemas was widely adopted. As chair of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) subcommittee of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) from 1978 to 1982, Bachman helped to formulate the seven layer model of computer communications that has provided the basic framework for discussion of network protocols ever since.

Bachman talks about his goals as founding chair of the group that created the Open Systems Interconnection seven layer model for computer communications.        
In 1983 Bachman founded his own company, Bachman Information Systems. It followed the classic path of a technology startup, winning funding from leading venture capital firms and making an initial public offering. Its products served the corporate market for data modeling and software engineering. He retired in 1996, but remained active as a consultant specializing in the design of database schemas.

Through all of this he retained an engineer’s zest for the elegant solution of difficult problems, and faith in the power of careful analysis and a systems approach to make the world a better place. As he wrote in a note at the end of our oral history transcript, “My work has been my play.”[7]

Author: Thomas Haigh



CHARLES WILLIAM BACHMAN DL作者简介链接
美国 - 1973年
褒奖
因其对数据库技术的杰出贡献。

简短注释
书目
亚马逊图灵奖
讲座
研究
主题
额外的
材料
采访录像
口述历史采访
通过创建集成数据存储（IDS），并大力倡导其背后的概念，查尔斯-W-巴克曼在建立数据库管理系统的概念方面具有独特的影响力。在漫长而多样的职业生涯中，他经营过一家化工厂，创建了成本资本会计系统，领导了一个早期的数据处理小组，开创了计算机在制造控制方面的应用，领导了数据库和计算机通信概念的标准化工作，赢得了计算机科学领域的最高荣誉，并创建了一家上市公司。

巴赫曼告诉我[7]，当他小时候考虑职业选择时，"我从来没有对其他东西感兴趣。我总是要成为一名工程师"。第二次世界大战暂时中断了，但在1950年，他的梦想实现了，密歇根州立大学和宾夕法尼亚大学的工程学位为他赢得了一份在陶氏化学公司的工作。对管理和成本会计方法的兴趣使他接触到打孔机，1957年他成为陶氏公司数据处理部门的创始负责人。他在那里的工作，以及他通过IBM的SHARE用户组与其他计算机中心领导人的接触，改变了他的职业生涯的进程。

业务问题导致陶氏在交货前取消了其计算机订单。感到沮丧的巴赫曼于1960年离开陶氏，到通用电气工作，当时通用电气是一个管理良好的多元化技术公司的教科书式的例子。他是一个团队的成员，负责试验新的方法，如运筹学、模拟、预测和自动化，以便在该公司的许多不同的业务部门中进行应用。在20世纪50年代，数以百计的美国企业急于订购计算机。有很多关于潜在好处的炒作，但让机器做任何有用的事情比预期的要难得多。它们往往最终只被用来实现狭窄的文职工作的自动化，如工资单或账单。到1960年，管理专家意识到，为了证明计算机化的巨大人员和硬件成本是合理的，公司将需要使用计算机将销售、会计和库存等业务流程联系在一起，这样经理们就可以获得综合的、最新的信息。这就是20世纪60年代企业计算机的伟大梦想。

许多公司试图建立这样的 "完全集成的管理信息系统"，但那个时代的硬件和软件使之难以实现。每个业务流程都单独运行，有自己的数据文件存储在磁带上。对一个程序的小改动可能意味着重写整个公司的相关程序。但是，业务需求不断变化，所以整合工作从未取得很大进展。

巴赫曼解释了通用电气的MIACS项目的目标，IDS就是为该项目创建的。        
在通用电气公司，巴赫曼正是在做这样一个 "集成系统 "项目，并为通用电气在费城的一家制造厂制作了制造信息和控制系统（MIACS）。他的团队使用第一批可用的磁盘驱动器之一，解决了击败许多其他人的基本问题。

到1963年投入使用的关键发明是巴赫曼的集成数据存储或IDS。IDS在磁盘上维护了一套共享文件，以及结构和维护这些文件的工具。负责特定任务的程序，如帐单或库存更新，通过向IDS发送请求来检索和更新这些文件。IDS为应用程序员提供了一套强大的命令来操作数据，这是不久后被称为数据操作语言的早期表现。

巴赫曼描述了他的集成数据存储（IDS）的功能，这是第一个数据库管理系统。        
这使程序员的工作效率大大提高，因为他们不必去处理与 "随机存取 "磁盘存储设备有关的令人生畏的复杂性。这也意味着文件可以被重组、移动或扩展，而无需重写所有访问它们的程序。IDS维护了一个单独的数据字典，跟踪系统中不同类型的记录及其关系--例如客户和他们所下的订单之间的信息。这是实现不同类型数据整合的关键一步，而这又对业务流程的整合和计算机作为管理工具的建立至关重要。只有巴赫曼的IDS设计的大胆，以及他将IDS和MIACS应用程序挤进一台内存为40KB的计算机的显著效率，才使这成为可能。这种紧密的耦合意味着IDS和问题控制器，一个由同一团队制作的交易调度系统，作为IDS的一个应用，几乎完全取代了通用电气的初级系统软件。多年后，才有其他程序与IDS的功能和灵活性相匹配。

巴赫曼描述了IDS问题控制器，一个作为IDS本身的应用而创建的事务调度系统。这消除了对独立操作系统的需求。        
到20世纪60年代末，像IDS这样的程序被称为 "数据库管理系统"，是商业计算研究和发展的最重要领域之一。当打包的大型机软件行业在20世纪70年代蓬勃发展时，数据库管理系统是其最重要的产品类别。巴赫曼在这一过程中发挥了重要作用，他是计算机贸易协会CODASYL（以商业编程的COBOL语言的创造者而闻名）建立的数据库任务组的早期主席和积极成员，以规范这一领域的概念、术语和技术。他对IDS的设计以及对网络数据模型基本概念的制定，对该小组的最终工作产生了最重要的影响。

1973年，巴赫曼成为第八个获得ACM图灵奖的人。当时，计算机科学是一门年轻的学科，它的领导人正在努力将其确立为一个有自己理论领域的受人尊敬的学术领域，而不是仅仅作为支持真正的科学家（如物理学家）工作所需的技术工具。因此，该奖项倾向于授予在著名大学工作的杰出理论家。巴赫曼是第一个没有博士学位的图灵奖得主，第一个在工程领域而不是科学领域接受培训的人，第一个因计算机在商业管理中的应用而获奖的人，第一个因特定软件而获奖的人，也是第一个将整个职业生涯都投入工业领域的人。巴赫曼认为这个奖项对他后来的职业发展没有什么影响，尽管它使他对阿兰-图灵的生活产生了兴趣，甚至去看望了阿兰-图灵的老母亲萨拉-图灵，当时她在英国的一家养老院。

他的获奖演讲 "作为导航员的程序员 "是一个有影响力的宣言，在这个新世界里，复杂的数据结构为公司的计算系统提供了框架，各个应用程序将围绕这些框架进行导航。这个奖项巩固了巴赫曼在业界的地位，他是数据库管理系统（DBMS）方面的领先专家，也是网络数据模型和受CODASYL方法影响的系统的最受尊敬的倡导者，这些系统在20世纪70年代中期在大型机领域迅速获得市场份额。

因此，他与Edgar F. ("Ted") Codd的观点相对立，后者是一位有数学倾向的IBM研究科学家，其数据库操作的关系模型吸引了越来越多的支持者，并开始使数据库系统合法化，成为计算机科学中一个理论上值得尊重的研究领域。1974年，在ACM的一个研讨会上，两人和他们的支持者进行了一场辩论，在数据库研究者中被称为他们领域发展的一个里程碑。巴赫曼代表着工程实用主义和成熟的高性能技术，而科德则代表着科学的严谨和优雅但未经证实的理论。他们的辩论没有结果，这也许是不可避免的，因为当时还没有实用的关系型系统产生。

巴赫曼对今天的数据库管理系统的影响是无庸置疑的，尽管基于科德的关系方法的数据库管理系统，如Oracle、DB2和SQL Server，在20世纪90年代末已经使CODASYL系统黯然失色。现代关系型系统继续沿用Bachman和他的同事在CODASYL中发明的数据库管理系统的基本模板：一个复杂的软件，管理数据存储，执行访问限制，为应用程序和临时查询提供接口，并为不同的用户提供对同一数据的不同看法。尽管Bachman所赞成的不同类型记录之间的刚性连接并不是关系模型本身的一部分，但实用主义已经推动现代系统以参考完整性约束的形式支持它们。

今天的数据库设计者依靠图形工具将不同表之间的关系描绘成一个连接网。这些 "数据结构图 "是Bachman设计的技术[3]的直接后代，用于说明MIACS的自适应制造控制逻辑所需的复杂数据结构。

巴赫曼在1970年代帮助指导了两个非常有影响力的委员会。研究小组--数据库系统是由美国国家标准协会（ANSI）的系统规划和资源委员会（SPARC）于1972年成立的。它对概念性、内部和外部模式的区分被广泛采用。1978年至1982年，作为国际标准化组织（ISO）开放系统互连（OSI）小组委员会的主席，巴赫曼帮助制定了计算机通信的七层模型，为此后的网络协议讨论提供了基本框架。

巴赫曼谈到了他作为创建计算机通信开放系统互连七层模型的小组创始主席的目标。        
1983年，巴赫曼成立了自己的公司，巴赫曼信息系统公司。该公司走的是典型的技术创业之路，赢得了领先的风险投资公司的资金，并进行了首次公开发行。其产品服务于数据建模和软件工程的企业市场。他于1996年退休，但作为专门从事数据库模式设计的顾问，他仍然很活跃。

通过这一切，他保留了工程师对优雅解决困难问题的热情，以及对仔细分析和系统方法使世界变得更好的信心。正如他在我们的口述历史记录的结尾处写道："我的工作就是我的游戏"[7] 。

作者。托马斯-海格