One of the principal designers of the original SQL language specification, Chamberlin also made significant contributions to the development of XQuery.
Donald D. Chamberlin was born in San Jose, in the USA. After attending Campbell High School, he studied engineering at Harvey Mudd College, from where he holds a B.S. After graduating, he went to Stanford University on a National Science Foundation grant, where he studied electrical engineering and minored in computer science. Chamberlin holds an M.Sc and a PhD degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University.
After graduating, Chamberlin went to work for IBM Research at the Yorktown Heights research facility in New York, where he had previously had a summer internship. In 2000, jointly with Jonathan Robie and Daniela Florescu, he drafted a proposal for an XML query language called Quilt. Many ideas from this proposal found their way into the XQuery language specification, which was developed by W3C with Chamberlin as principal editor. XQuery became a W3C Recommendation in January 2007.
