SQL at 50: What’s next for the structured query language?
In May 1974, Donald Chamberlin and Raymond Boyce published a paper on SEQUEL, a structured query language that could be used to manage and sort data. After a change in title due to another company’s copyright on the word SEQUEL, Structured Query Language (SQL) was taken up by database companies like Oracle alongside their new-fangled relational database products later in the 1970s. The rest, as they say, is history.
SQL is now 50 years old. SQL was designed and then adopted around databases, and it has continued to grow and develop as a way to manage and interact with data. According to Stack Overflow, it is the third most popular language used by professional programmers on a regular basis. In 2023, the IEEE noted that SQL was the most popular language for developers to know when it came to getting a job, due to how it could be combined with other programming languages.