Tuesday, July 5, 2011

How the language “SQL” is born?

Simple thing that you may not know ……….

Structured Query Language was born in 1970, supporting Edgar F. Codd’s Relational Database Model. It was invented at IBM by Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce (who introduced 3.5 NF) for IBM’s RDBMS called System R. The initial name of it was Structured English Query Language (SEQUEL) but changed to SQL later as SEQUEL was a trademark of another company.

The first commercially available implementation of SQL was released by Relational Software Inc. (now known as Oracle Corporation). It was in June 1979, for Oracle V2. Relational Software Inc. started developing their own RDBMS based on Codd’s theories in 1970s.

Not only SQL, there were other RDBMS and SQL related languages. In 1970, University of California, Berkeley created a RDBMS named Ingres (Known as Open Source RDBMS) and QUEL was the language created for managing its data. With various different implementations, later it evolved into PostgreSQL.

IBM continued with its System R and SQL Implementation, making it as a commercial product named System38. It was in 1979. Now it has been evolved into DB2 which was released in 1983.

SQL has many extensions now. Some of them are;

  • Oracle – PL/SQL
  • IBM – SQL PL
  • Microsoft – T-SQL

SQL was standardized by American National Standard Institute (ANSI) in 1986 as SQL-86. In 1987, it was standardized by International Organization for Standardization (ISO) too. It has been revised in many times, starting with SQL-86 to SQL:2008.

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