Why Is SQL So Popular for Database Management?
Two Answers to Consider
While relational theory is based on elegant mathematical principles, SQL is an implementation language. It’s an imperfect implementation of relational theory. Close, but not perfect.
There are two reasons SQL became popular when it was introduced. Let’s have a look.
Reason One: Abstraction
The first reason is that it solved a problem that was very important to its users. Software engineers were tired of using database systems that required the programmer to understand details about the data storage. Prior to relational databases, data was more likely to be organized in files of records and accessed by programming lots of code to seek to specific offsets within the file to find a given record. If rows weren’t of fixed length, their offsets had to be tracked down one by one. SQL was effectively an abstraction layer, so the programmer could work with sets of records without having to know how they were stored.
Reason Two: No Competition
The second reason is that SQL was only game in town. SQL was developed at IBM, a computer system vendor with enormous credibility. It became the query language for IBM’s System R family of products with first commercial release in 1979. System R was probably successful because it had good performance, not only because it supported the SQL language.
A New Player and Widespread Adoption
A new startup competitor, Relational Software Inc., developed their own relational database, and “borrowed” the SQL language. Their product, also released in 1979, became known as Oracle v2. The company, renamed to Oracle Corporation, was at one time the largest software company in the world. There were larger computer technology companies, but they all made both hardware and software.
By 1986, just seven years after the first commercial appearance of SQL, the language was standardized by ANSI and ISO, and other vendors began implementing the SQL language according to the published standard. This widespread adoption promoted interoperability and leveraged skills of software engineers who knew the language.
Other companies, large and small, quickly jumped into this SQL market because it was an open standard, it was well designed, and it had momentum behind it. As they say, nothing succeeds like success.
A Modern Comparison
Imagine if the same thing were done today. Suppose a foundational software technology were introduced seven years ago (which would be 2015 as we write this in 2022), adopted by both the dominant system integrator and a hot startup, and then made stable in an international standard.
Docker containerization is a pretty close analog. It was first implemented in 2013, and today Docker is ubiquitous, widely adopted by major companies like Cisco, Google, Redhat, IBM, Huawei, and Microsoft, as well as startups like Docker Inc. and HashiCorp. That’s noteworthy for how fast it became so popular.
Docker still isn’t an official ANSI/ISO standard, though the OCI (Open Container Initiative) may change this in the future.
Takeaway
When a technology comes along at just the right time and fills an important need, it can catch on like wildfire. If it solves the problem in a powerful but flexible way, then it’s unlikely another technology will displace it.
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