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For most programming tasks, you've got quite the selection of languages to choose from, and good strong communities behind plenty of them. But when you need to work with a database, there's really only one viable choice these days: SQL. Sure, there are different companies with different implementations and dialects, but you're still looking things up with
SELECT columns
FROM table
JOIN other_table ON criteria
WHERE other_criteria
It wasn't always this way, though. As late as the early 90s, there was no single obvious way to interact with a database. But today, there is. And with the way computer languages tend to proliferate rather than converge, I find that a bit odd. What historical and technical factors led to SQL's almost complete dominance of the database access domain?
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While SQL is highly functional, it tends to work better with small databases and doesn't always lend itself to managing expansive ones. That said, SQL still ranks as the third-most-used language in the programming industry, with over half (54.7%) of surveyed developers reporting that they use it.
Raymond Boyce and Donald Chamberlin developed SQL at IBM in the early 1970s. It was created for getting access and modifying data held in databases. Initially, it was called SEQUEL (Structured English Query Language) but later needed to change its name because another business claimed that name as a trademark.
It is a very powerful tool because it is good for creating and managing large databases, which most tech corporations utilize. SQL uses English statements, making it easy to use. SQL also is able to run on many different platforms such as servers, computers, or tablets (Why SQL…, 2011).
SQL history The programming language, known then as SEQUEL, was created following Edgar Frank Codd's paper, “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks,” in 1970. In his paper, Codd proposed that all data in a database be represented in relations. Based on this theory, Boyce and Chamberlin came up with SQL.
It's like this Winston Churchill quote:
Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
There were alternative database technologies before 1970 when the relational model was first proposed. There have been alternatives the whole time since then, and there are new alternatives today.
But of all the alternatives, no solution besides SQL provides as good a balance for:
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Here's a reference from the Codd Wikipedia article - some detail on how SQL 'won out'.
Committee on Innovations in Computing and Communications: Lessons from History: The Rise of Relational Databases.
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