The Unreasonable Effectiveness of SQL

Two score and five years ago two young IBM researchers brought forth on databases, a new language, conceived in relational, dedicated to the proposition that data can be manipulated declaratively and easily. In the years since Don Chamberlin and Ramond Boyce published SEQUEL: A Structured English Query Language relational model and SQL have been extended and adapted to a significant number of technologies: OLTP, OLAP, object databases, object-relational databases, and even NoSQL. SQL has inspired query language design for non-relational databases: SQL for object databases, SQL for object-relational, SQL for XML, SQL for spatial, SQL for search, SQL for JSON, SQL for timeseries, SQL for streams and so on. Every BI tool interacts with the data using variety of SQL. In fact, SQL is the most successful 4th generation language.