3 ms·

I'm not understanding SQL as an accident of history, can you explain?

• dragonwriter 11y ago
  SQL was the query language of the first major commercially successful RDBMSs (from IBM, who developed the language, and Oracle) -- which weren't the first two RDBMSs, and were arguably successful for reasons largely unrelated to the query language chosen -- and became the de facto standard because of that. So, yeah, I can see the "historical accident" there.
• btilly 11y ago
  The ideas behind SQL started with Codd's relational algebra, which has some very large differences from SQL. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_algebra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_algebra for more. Query languages were developed based on that. However as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL documents, a team at IBM implemented something called System R (R for Relational) with a query language called SEQUEL that was renamed to SQL for trademark reasons. Then Relational Software (now Oracle) implemented a database that could run on non-IBM software, and made their query language mostly compatible with IBM's so people could port to their database. And everyone who came after has made their implementations compatible for the same market reason that Oracle originally did. Even today there are people who want to return to some of the ideas that Codd had which SQL does not implement. But there is such momentum around SQL that it is unlikely to ever happen.