•In 1983, I went to work at Power Computing, a division of University Computing Company, in Dallas, Texas. There I met Merle and had the distinct pleasure of learning database technology from one of the software industry's true giants.

•Merle told me that Power Computing had been working on a COBOL database application for the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC).

•The data was for the new Generating Availability Data System (GADS).

•My first exposure to NERC GADS and the beginning of a life long passion for engineering data and software applications. I created MicroGADS in 1987 for the new IBM PC XT and AT computers (DOS operating system) using Nantucket's Clipper computer programming language and dBase III as the database.

•Merle Proulx, formerly chief scientist at NexQL, is best known for his work with relational database technology. Called a database visionary, Merle had a 40-year history of affecting the industry and was listed as one of many “People Important to Software History” by the Software History Center (www.softwarehistory.org). He developed a hardware/software combination database computer.

•Merle spent more than 20 years with University Computing, where he directed work with the language compiler groups that developed the UCC FORTRAN (formula translator) and UCC COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) languages and developed the first working commercially used relational database management system. It was called DB4 and was used for the UNIVAC 1100. Merle went on to form his own company, Caltex Software, specializing in the product “D The Data Language,” an entity-relational DBMS and application development platform, of which Merle was the author. Wham Technologies (makers of WholeWeb.net) bought Caltex Software in 1998, and Merle continued to serve as vice president and chief technology architect of WholeWeb.net until moving on to NexQL.

•During his distinguished career, Merle worked for Boeing and the Goddard Space Flight Center (NASA). It was at NASA that he coded telemetry reduction for NIMBUS satellites. Merle graduated from the University of Washington with a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1964. He also held the patent for the Index Relational Processor, a hardware board that speeds queries by a factor of 1,000 or more (U.S. Patent 6,334,123 issued on December 25, 2001). He invented the board with Jay B. Ross.

•Merle passed away on October 19, 2009.