I'll disagree with you that we have vendors to blame. Vendors are trying to give users new features and support existing applications. The way new features ge

I'll disagree with you that we have vendors to blame. Vendors are trying to give users new features and support existing applications. The way new features get added to ANSI SQL is primarily by those features being adopted by multiple vendors and then one vendor's implementation (usually Oracle's) is selected as the standard. You also have to keep in mind that ANSI SQL is a pure relational language. It's artificial in many senses. There are essentially no details of implementation in ANSI SQL. These implementation details include everything from a modular database engine like MySQL, multiple index algorithms or clustering options like PostgreSQL, deep features like external procedural languages extensions, and so on. None of these type of features are considered by the standards body. It's entirely left up to the vendors to create them. Well, a lot of features like these end up becoming standardized precisely because they become popular ways to solve problems. Statements like BACKUP DATABASE and RESTORE DATABASE are not a consideration of standard SQL because that is considered an implementation detail. Point in time recovery and log file handling are all different. Other features like string aggregation, JSON and XML support, etc. all began as vendor extensions before they were standardized. Yes, sometimes the standard will create a new extension that no vendor supports or only minimally supports like the new MATCH_RECOGNIZE() expression. But for the most part it's the standard that lags behind and takes cues from the vendors. Even then, the results of standard SQL sometimes are not adopted by vendors because nobody needs the features the standards body invents. Indeed, the standards body has sometimes standardized what would later be identified as bad practices. Elements like NATURAL JOIN or KEY JOIN (I think that's in the standard) are considered bad design since they result in ambiguous column joining when you start adding multiple tables or modifying the schema. This is basically the exact same issue as XHTML vs HTML5 and browser vendors. It's not quite as bad since there's no W3C vs WHATWG political garbage (I can't imagine how bad it'd be if ANSI and ISO didn't cooperate) but it's the same kind of thing. Vendors are in competition and want to provide features that developers need. They're not going to wait for the ISO joint technical committee to decide what to do.