Chris Date attended
High Wycombe Royal Grammar School from 1951 to 1958 and received his
BA in
Mathematics from
Cambridge University in 1962. He entered the computer business as a mathematical programmer at
Leo Computers Ltd. (London), where he quickly moved into education and training. In 1966, he earned his master's degree at Cambridge, and, in 1967, he joined
IBM Hursley (UK) as a
computer programming instructor. Between 1969 and 1974, he was a principal instructor in IBM's European education program. While working at IBM he was involved in technical planning and design for the IBM products
SQL/DS and
DB2. He was also involved with
Edgar F. Codd's
relational model for database management. He left IBM in 1983 and has written extensively of the relational model, in association with
Hugh Darwen. As of 2007 his book
An Introduction to Database Systems, currently in its 8th edition, has sold well over 700,000 copies, not counting translations, and is used by several hundred colleges and universities worldwide. He is also the author of many other books on
data management, most notably
Databases, Types, and the Relational Model, subtitled and commonly referred to as
The Third Manifesto, currently in its third edition (note that earlier editions were titled differently, but maintained the same subtitle), a proposal for the future direction of
DBMSs. ==Works==