Raymond (Ray) F. Boyce

Co-developer of SQL, the first commercially successful language for relational databases, Boyce's work established the standard for relational database query languages still in use today. He was also known for his research in relational databases more broadly, including co-developing Boyce-Codd normal form. He grew up in New York and went to college in Providence, Rhode Island. Boyce earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1971 at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. During his time at Purdue, he met his wife Sandy, who was a nursing student.

After leaving Purdue, he worked on database projects for IBM in Yorktown Heights, New York. In the early 1970s, together with Donald D. Chamberlin, he co-developed Structured Query Language (SQL) while managing the Relational Database development group for IBM in San Jose, California. Initially called SEQUEL (Structured English Query Language) and based on their original language called SQUARE (Specifying Queries As Relational Expressions), SEQUEL was designed to manipulate and retrieve data in relational databases. By 1974, Boyce and Chamberlin published "SEQUEL: A Structured English Query Language," which detailed their refinements to SQUARE and introduced the data retrieval aspects of SEQUEL. It was one of the first languages to use Edgar F. Codd's relational model.

SEQUEL was later renamed to SQL by dropping the vowels, because SEQUEL was a trademark registered by the Hawker Siddeley aircraft company. Today, SQL is generally established as the standard relational database language.

In 1974, he and Edgar F. Codd co-developed the Boyce–Codd normal form (or BCNF). It is a type of normal form that is used in database normalization. The goal of relational database design is to generate a set of database schemas that store information without unnecessary redundancy. Boyce–Codd accomplished this and allowed users to retrieve information easily. Using BCNF, databases have all redundancy removed based on functional dependencies, and it is a slightly stronger version of the third normal form.

Boyce died in 1974 as a result of an aneurysm of the brain, leaving behind his wife of almost five years, Sandy, and his daughter Kristin, who was just ten months old.