Nothing else offered Codd's relational model of: 0. simple user commands 1. data independence (from hardware and software implementation) 2. automatic naviga

Nothing else offered Codd's relational model of: 0. simple user commands 1. data independence (from hardware and software implementation) 2. automatic navigation (instead of single record access). The rest was competitive history with the giant of the time, IBM, who created and used SQL in their relational System R product. SQL variants rapidly became commercial successes, with the earliest external adoption and most notable being that by Oracle. In time, SQL became a standard and, as a relatively simple declarative language (the HTML of data if you will), it is easy to learn and widespread.