Kapali Eswaran

Kapali Eswaran is one of the founding members of the IBM System R Project, which formed the genesis of relational database technology.

Eswaran is a graduate of Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley. He was an architect of IBM System R, the precursor to DB2. Eswaran was one of the inventors of SQL language. The Eswaran principle relating to database locking and transactions is a contribution that he made along with Jim Gray and Irv Traiger while working as a scientist at IBM Research. Subsequently he launched Esvel, Inc. (acquired by Cullinet Software in 1987, which itself was acquired by Computer Associates) and Kaps Corporation (technology acquired by subsidiary of BP, Hewlett-Packard and by Carlysle Library Systems). He is currently the CEO of Integrated Informatics Inc.