IMHO the fact that it costs money to read the ANSI SQL standard, is the biggest reason there’s never been any work toward a standardized SQL wire protocol. (At

IMHO the fact that it costs money to read the ANSI SQL standard, is the biggest reason there’s never been any work toward a standardized SQL wire protocol. (At this point Postgres’s wire protocol is becoming the de-facto wire protocol for smaller players to make themselves compatible with, but that’s still a long ways from being able to talk to every major enterprise DBMS with the same codec-layer library, rather than needing ODBC-style codec plugins.) You need tons and tons of people to work together on a cross-implementation standardization effort like that (including, hopefully, lots of volunteer FOSS contributors); and all those people would need to be referencing the standard constantly. It’d just be untenable if every one of them needed to pay to see the standard they were coding against.