Gerald D. Held
Gerald D. Held received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, 1970. He also earned a master’s degree in systems engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1972 and a doctorate in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1975.
Held is chief executive officer of the Held Group. He wrote the original Quel query language and was the chief programmer and co-architect of the original INGRES relational database management system. He led numerous product development efforts during the early years of Tandem Computers and played a major role in the company’s overall strategic planning. He left Tandem after 18 years to join Oracle Corp., where he was the senior vice president of the server technologies division.
In 1999, he formed the Held Group, a venture capital firm in San Jose, Calif. Held is active on the boards of several not-for-profit organizations, including the Tech Museum of Innovation, the Fisher Center for Information Technology and Management, CommerceNet and 4Charity.com, which hosts an online charity mall and is creating a database of information about not-for-profit issues in the United States. Held participated in Purdue’s Vision 21 campaign and is active in events for Purdue’s Silicon Valley electrical and computer engineering alumni. He was named a Purdue Outstanding Electrical Engineer in 1997.