ABOUT THE AUTHOR

C.J.Date is an independent author, lecturer, researcher, and consultant special-izing in relational database systems. He was one of the first persons anywhere to recog-nize the fundamental importance of Codd's pioneering work on the relational model. He was also involved in technical planning for the IBM products SQL/DS and DB2 at the IBM Santa Teresa Laboratory in San Jose, California. He is best known for his books, in particular An Introduction to Database Systems, Eighth Edition (Addison-Wesley, 2004), the standard text in the field, which has sold nearly three quarters of a million copies world-wide, and (with Hugh Darwen and Nikos A. Lorentzos) Temporal Data and the Relational Model (Morgan Kaufmann, 2003). He enjoys a reputation that is second to none for his ability to explain complex technical material in a clear and understandable fashion.