However, PostgreSQL wouldn't sound right as "postgresequel" but "post-GRES-que-ell" or simply "postgres". If you look at Oracle's official documentation on SQL, it says it's still pronounced "sequel." Microsoft SQL Server is also very often pronounced as "sequel server": Bill Gates uses it on his SQL Server/Miller Lite Commercial. The official way to pronounce "MySQL" is "My Ess Que Ell" (not "my sequel"), but some do not mind if you pronounce it as "my sequel" or in some other localized way. Is the historical context that relevant?Īlso, note that implementations may have their own preferences. "Sequel" gets the most votes, but Chamberlin says "Ess-Cue-Ell," and he gets an extra vote because he's the co-developer of SQL. Date in "A guide to the SQL Standard" (1987) also pronounced the term as "sequel". Jennifer Widom, co-author of four popular database books, pronounced SQL Language as "sequel" in her Stanford database course. However, many English-speaking database professionals still use the nonstandard pronunciation "sequel." The standard says that 'Ess-cue-ell' is the appropriate way of speaking SQL. Some people are for "sequel," some are for "S.Q.L.," and still others make their own pronunciations. On the Internet, there are many battles about how SQL should be pronounced. This was followed by SQL/DS in 1981, and finally DB2 1983, which remains IBM's flagship RDMS product to this day. Within weeks of the Oracle V2 release, IBM released its first offering, System R, using a new query language called SEQUEL developed by IBM.
In 1979, not long after IBM's prototype, the first SQL product, ORACLE V2, was released by Relational Software (which was later renamed to Oracle Corporation). Unfortunately, due to trademark violations on the acronym SEQUEL, which was already registered by the Hawker Siddeley aircraft company, the name was changed to Structured Query Language and abbreviated as SQL. By 1974 they published the query language SEQUEL (Structured English Query Language) based on SQUARE. Boyce were developing SQUARE (Specifying Queries As Relational Expressions) – a query language. Codd's 1970 publication "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks." While Codd's ideas were remarkable for the time, in San Jose, California, two colleagues named Donald D. Relational databases came into existence with E.F.
However, many people still struggle with just how to pronounce the term SQL. SQL has been around for decades and supports a many billion dollar market.