Structured Query Language or SQL is one of the most important standard computer languages used for storing data, as well as retrieving and editing it.
Interestingly, despite being such an important part of many business IT systems that an SQL server monitor is standard equipment to avoid costly issues and downtime, the man who conceived of the principles behind it did not like the finished product.
The two inventors of SQL, Donald D Chamberlin and Raymond F Boyce, started to work on SQL based on the relational model of databases invented by computer scientist Edgar F Codd.
Mr Codd, who had also written a thesis on self-replicating computers that was 45 years ahead of its time, developed a theory for data management known as the Relational Model, which was a set of tuples (finite ordered lists, generally described as rows) grouped into relations (a collection of tuples, often described as a table).
It was the first database model that used formal mathematical principles to describe it, but he grew increasingly frustrated as IBM delayed in implementing it, with Mr Chamberlin and Mr Boyce being less than familiar with the principles of the relational model and deviating from it.
As a result, whilst Mr Codd had developed a proposed database language tentatively named Alpha, Mr Chamberlin and Mr Boyce had instead developed SEQUEL, a follow up to their own SQUARE (short for Specifying Queries in A Relational Environment), shortened to SQL for trademark reasons.
SQL proved to be much superior to any other database system that predated the relational model and because of its success and the success of Oracle V2, the first commercial implementation of SQL, would become widely copied and standardised, much to Mr Codd’s chagrin.
He devised twelve rules to determine what makes a relational database management system and would campaign so fervently to avoid the misuse of the term relational database that it would eventually cost him his job at IBM.