Donald J. Haderle

Known as the "Father of DB2" for leading the architecture and design of DB2, one of the first commercial relational database management systems (RDBMS), Haderle is an American computer scientist and IBM Fellow. DB2 debuted on IBM's mainframe system MVS in 1983 and validated the applicability of relational databases for high performance transaction processing. With DB2, enterprises store, retrieve, and analyze their business transaction data.

In the IEEE Computer Society publication that he co-authored with Cynthia M. Saracco of IBM, entitled "The History and Growth of IBM's DB2", Haderle describes the early technology hurdles, the shift from a monolithic architecture to a distributed architecture portable across many operating systems (Unix, Windows, OS/2, and others), and the technology collaborations with IBM Research. DB2 is used in most enterprises around the world.

Haderle was born and raised in San Francisco, California and studied at Archbishop Riordan High School. He received a B.A. degree in Economics from the University of California Berkeley in 1967. He worked at the Port of New York Authority in New York, New York for a year and then joined IBM in San Jose, California as a computer programmer in 1968.

He was appointed IBM Fellow in 1989 and Chief Technology Officer for Database Management in 1991. Before his retirement from IBM in 2005, Haderle has served as Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Information Management. He has also been elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2008 and was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2000.

On February 23, 2008, he joined Boardwalktech as a Technology Advisor; the company provides enterprise spreadsheet data management solutions that enable cell-level collaboration for spreadsheet-based processes across the extended enterprise. In November 2010, Haderle joined Aerospike, a company working on a NoSQL database called Aerospike database, as a Technology Advisor, a relationship formally announced in August 2012. On March 26, 2013, he joined ParStream as a Technology Advisor. ParStream was a company working on a real-time SQL columnar database for big data analytics called ParStream database.