Dr. Peter Chen on the Entity Relationship Model and ADO.NET Entity Framework

Dr. Peter Chen is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, and AAAS and has received many prestigious awards including ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award and IEEE Harry Goode Award. He has been listed in Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in the World for more than 15 years.

Dr. Chen's original paper on the Entity-Relationship model (ER model), published in 1976 is one of the most cited papers in the computer software field. Based on one particular citation database, Chen's paper is the 35th most cited article in Computer Science.  It is the 4^th most downloaded paper from the ACM Digital Library in January 2005 (Communications of ACM, March 2005) even though the paper was published 30 years ago.

Dr. Chen’s work is a cornerstone of software engineering, in particular Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE).  In the late 80’s and early 90’s, IBM’s Application Development Cycle (AD/Cycle) framework and DB2 repository (RM/MVS) were based on the ER model.  Other vendors’ repository systems such as Digital’s CDD+ were also based on the ER model.  Prof. Chen has made significant impact on the CASE industry by his research work and by his lecturing around the world on structured system development methodologies.  Most of the major CASE tools including Computer Associates’ ERWIN, Oracle’s Designer/2000, and Sybase’s PowerDesigner (and even a general drawing tool like Microsoft’s VISIO) are influenced by the ER model.

In this podcast, Brian Beckman interviews Dr. Chen along with Jose Blakeley, Software Architect, SQL Server, and Britt Johnston, Director of Program Management, Data Programmability. Join as we discuss the ideas behind Dr. Chen's original paper, how these concepts have subsequently influenced the software industry and database technologies, and how the ADO.NET Entity Framework is an execution runtime for the ER model.