A Brief History of SQL

The history of the SQL language is intimately intertwined with the development of relational databases. Table 3-1 shows some of the milestones in its 30-year history. The relational database concept was originally developed by Dr. E.F. "Ted" Codd, an IBM researcher. In June 1970 Dr. Codd published an article entitled "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks" that outlined a mathematical theory of how data could be stored and manipulated using a tabular structure. Relational databases and SQL trace their origins to this article, which appeared in the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery.

1970 Codd defines relational database model

1974 IBM's System/R project begins

1974 First article describing the SEQUEL language

1978 System/R customer tests

1979 Oracle introduces first commercial RDBMS

1981 Relational Technology introduces Ingres

1981 IBM announces SQL/DS

1982 ANSI forms SQL standards committee

1983 IBM announces DB2

1986 ANSI SQL1 standard ratified

1986 Sybase introduces RDBMS for transaction processing

1987 ISO SQL1 standard ratified

1988 Ashton-Tate and Microsoft announce SQL Server for OS/2

1989 First TPC benchmark (TPC-A) published

1990 TPC-B benchmark published

1991 SQL Access Group database access specification published

1992 Microsoft publishes ODBC specification

1992 ANSI SQL2 standard ratified

1992 TPC-C (OLTP) benchmark published

1993 First shipment of specialized SQL data warehousing systems

1993 First shipment of ODBC products

1994 TPC-D (decision support) benchmark published

1994 Commercial shipment of parallel database server technology

1996 Publication of standard API for OLAP database access and OLAP benchmark

1997 IBM DB2 UDB unifies DB2 architecture across IBM and other vendor platforms

1997 Major DBMS vendors announce Java integration strategies

1998 Microsoft SQL Server 7 provides enterprise-level database support for Windows NT

1998 Oracle 8i provides database/Internet integration and moves away from client/server model