Joe Celko

Joe Celko is an American relational database expert from Austin, Texas, who works on the SQL language. He took part in the ANSI X3H2 Database Standards Committee and helped write the SQL-89 and SQL-92 standards. He wrote a long series of SQL books for Morgan Kaufmann and more than 1200 published articles on SQL and other database topics, after spending several years as a full-time statistician. He is credited with coining the term lasagna code and with popularizing Michael J. Kamfonas's nested set model for storing trees in SQL, along with a taxonomy of data encoding schemes and several design patterns in SQL data definition and manipulation. He holds two master's degrees, one in mathematics from Georgia State University and one in computer science from Georgia Tech. His consulting work began in 1965 and has covered prisons, medical organizations, NASA, defense contractors and commercial firms, and he has taught in many countries and was part of the founding faculty of Neumont University.