An Analysis of the Evolution, Impact, and Future of SQL Language

This report provides a comprehensive overview of the evolution of the Structured Query Language (SQL). It begins with an introduction to the need for organized data management and the emergence of relational database management systems (RDBMS). The report traces the development of SQL, originally known as SEQUEL, highlighting its origins at IBM and its subsequent adoption by Oracle and other vendors. It details the key features and constructs that characterize SQL, including commands for creating, inserting, selecting, and modifying data within relational databases. The report examines the contributions of SQL to the field of database management, its success in various applications, and its limitations in the face of Big Data. The analysis includes the strengths and weaknesses of SQL, design trade-offs, and its influence on next-generation languages. The evolution of SQL from its early days to its present status is explored in detail, focusing on its impact on the software and business industries. The report concludes with a discussion of SQL's enduring relevance and the challenges it faces in the rapidly evolving landscape of data management, especially with the emergence of Big Data. The report also mentions the different versions of SQL, such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle SQL Plus, and MySQL, and discusses the trade-offs and applications of each of them. The report also provides examples of SQL commands and queries, such as creating tables, inserting data, and retrieving information from tables, to demonstrate the practical application of SQL.

Running head: THE EVOLUTION OF SQL
The Evolution of SQL
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THE EVOLUTION OF SQL
Table of Contents
1. Introduction............................................................................................................................2
2. The development of SQL Language......................................................................................2
2.1 Implementing SQL...........................................................................................................3
2.2 Features and Constructs that characterize SQL...............................................................3
2.3 Programming style and examples....................................................................................4
3. The evolution of SQL.............................................................................................................5
3.1 Contributions of SQL in the field of Database Management Systems............................5
3.2 Success of SQL and RDBMS..........................................................................................6
3.3 Failure tasted by SQL in the recent past..........................................................................6
3.3 Influencing the next generation languages.......................................................................6
4. Analysis of SQL.....................................................................................................................6
4.1 Strength and weaknesses..................................................................................................6
4.2 Design trade-offs..............................................................................................................7
5. Conclusion..............................................................................................................................7

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1. Introduction
To maintain any business, there shall be data and hence there shall be a need to
organize data in a proper fashion. The requirement for an organized method to maintain data
was solved by the development of the Database Management System. However, today with
the advent of technologies and the internet, the volume and variety of data has also increased.
It is a known fact that the pre-relational database systems did not have their own set of
language to work with data handling. They had to depend upon the assistance of other
languages like C and COBOL in order to manipulate and retrieve data from the database.
However, handling the database model was still an attempt of massacre back then. Therefore,
the Relational Database model was introduced. The Relational Database Management System
was designed with the aim to store data in the form tables and relational. This boosted the
ability to store or retrieve data from the database. SQL was later introduced as the prime
language for RDBMS designing. SQL or Structured Query Language is a major database
computer language. It was one of the first commercial languages, which was designed for
database handling. The SQL language serves the purpose of management and retrieval of data
in relational databases.
This report aims to talk about the evolution of the SQL language with keen details
about how the language was developed, what milestones it had achieved and the changes it
has faced of the past decades.
2. The development of SQL Language
Initially developed at the IBM centres by Raymond F. Boyce and Donald D.
Chamberlin in the early 1970s, SQL was called as SEQUEL or Structure English Query
Language. Its initial purpose was to manipulate and retrieve data that was stored in System R,
the quasi-relational database management system of the company. However, the acronym
‘SEQUEL’ had to be changed to ‘SQL’ as a UK-based aircraft company already had the
trademark rights over the name. Later that decade, Relational Software Inc. now commonly
known as Oracle Corporation, recognized the importance and potential in the concepts of the
language and they developed their own system, driven by SQL. This system was named
Oracle Version 2. It was a commercially available product, initially designed for the VAX
computers. After having tested SQL in the various customer test sites, IBM determined its
practicality and usefulness. Doing so, they started working on their new chain of projects.
This time, they were far more determined to grasp the commercial market through their
software launches. They developed prototypes of the System R model. These included the
SQL/DS, DB2 and System/38, which were available commercially in the late 1970s and early
1980s. Currently, various relational database systems or RDBMSs like Oracle Database, IBM
DB2, MySQL, Microsoft’s SQL Server and Microsoft Access use SQL as their primary or
background programming paradigm.
Karsai et al. (2014), says SQL is a domain specific non-procedural language. It can be
used to store, update and retrieve data from a relational database model. The relational
database consists of one or many tables that hold data. SQL helps to access these tables and
create relationships between the tables within the database, thus creating a strong database,
which is easy to work with. The working of the language shall be discussed in details in the
upcoming sections of the report. However, as mentioned earlier, the language was designed
with the primary motive of database handling, which remains the same application until date.
However, with the advent of technology the language has gone through several
modifications. These are to be elaborately explained in a later context.

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2.1 Implementing SQL
As stated earlier, SQL is a database operating language. It includes the creation,
deletions and modification of data in the form of rows and columns in a table. It also allows
the users to fetch data from the database using their specific search criteria. SQL is an
American national Standards Institute or ANSI standard language. However, the database
word has seen numerous versions of the language over the past years.
The various dialects of the language that are widely used are:
 Microsoft SQL server
 Oracle SQL Plus
 The MS Access version of JET SQL
 SQLite
These will be further discussed under the evolution phase of the SQL language.
SQL commands are executed in a different procedure compared to other
programming language codes. While executing an SQL command line for a RDM System,
the best way to carry out the process request is figured out by the system and then the SQL
engine takes up the responsibility of the interpretation of the task. The various steps and
components involved in the execution of an SQL command are as follows:
 Query Dispatcher
 Optimization Engines
 Classic Query Engine
 SQL Query Engine and so on.
2.2 Features and Constructs that characterize SQL
SQL provides its users with a wide range of tools and commands to build a database
and store and retrieve data from it. The primary features of the language that make it mostly
popular among the mass are listed as follows:
1. SQL allows users to access and modify data with in a relational database.
2. SQL features allows users to create and delete or drop database and their respective
tables.
3. Data in the database can be described.
4. Users are given the opportunity to define and manipulate data in the database.
5. SQL also allows users to create views and functions in the database.
6. Users can set permissions on tables, views and procedures.
7. The most important feature of SQL is probably the ability to integrate with other
programming languages. SQL database can be used as back-end data storage and
retrieval platforms. SQL modules, pre-compilers and libraries.
The classic query engine of SQL handles the SQL queries and not the logical files or
commands. The diagram (Fig. 1) below explains the SQL Architecture.

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Fig: 1
A language construct is defined as a syntactical part of a program. It may be formed
from one or many lexical tokens that abides by the rules of the particular programming
language. In simpler words, it is basically the syntax in which a programming language is
constructed. In this case, for SQL the construct of a general SQL query is as follows:
1. Creating a table
CREATE TABLE table_name (field_name data_type constraint);
2. Inserting into table
INSERT INTO table_name (field_name) VALUES (field_values);
3. Select data from the table
SELECT field_names FROM table_name WHERE condition;
These are the three most required and basic command constructs of SQL. It can be
seen from the above constructs that a semicolon ‘;’ is necessary to end a query. In addition,
the values and field names must be represented within parenthesis as parameters. Some real
life examples of the language that makes use of these constructs shall be presented in the
section below.
2.3 Programming style and examples
Here, an example will be drawn of a SCHOOL database that has two tables namely,
STUDENTS and SUBJECTS. These tables shall have another intermediate table that would
define the relationship between STUDENT and the SUBJECT tables through a STUDIES
table.
--Creates the STUDENTS table with the required fields and primary key.
CREATE TABLE STUDENTS (STU_ID NUMBER(4) PRIMARY KEY, STU_NAME
VARCHAR(30), PHONE NUMBER(10));
--Creates the SUBJECTS table with the required fields and primary key.

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CREATE TABLE SUBJECTS (SUB_ID NUMBER(2) PRIMARY KEY, SUB_NAME
VARCHAR(20));
--Creates the STUDIES table with the required fields and primary key.
CREATE TABLE STUDIES (STUDENT_ID NUMBER(4) NOT NULL, SUBJECT_ID
NUMBER(2) NOT NULL);
--Alter tables to add foreign keys.
ALTER TABLE (ADD CONSTRAINT FK_STU FOREIGN KEY (STUDENT_ID)
REFERENCES STUDENTS (STU_ID));
ALTER TABLE (ADD CONSTRAINT FK_SUB FOREIGN KEY (SUBJECT_ID)
REFERENCES STUDENTS (SUB_ID));
--Inserting values into table
INSERT INTO STUDENTS(STU_ID, STU_NAME, PHONE) VALUES (0194, ‘JOHN
JOHNSON’, 6135559999);
--Running queries
--A query to print all values from the SUBJECTS table.
SELECT *FROM SUBJECTS;
The ‘SELECT *FROM tableName’ selects and displays all records and field stored in
the SUBJECTS table.
--A query that would print all Students names who have enrolled for a subject.
SELECT STU_NAME FROM STUDENTS WHERE STU_ID IN (SELECT STUDENT_ID
FROM STUDIES);
--A query that counts the number of students stored in the table.
SELECT COUNT (STUDENT_ID) FROM STUDENTS;
The above example shows how tables are created, altered and data is entered into
them. The query examples shows how to retrieve required information from the tables using
the SELECT command. The count() function is used as a mathematical tool. SUM(), AVG()
and so on are other such mathematical query options available. The comment lines written
after “--“describe what the following command statements fulfil.
3. The evolution of SQL
3.1 Contributions of SQL in the field of Database Management Systems
SQL has proved to be a boon to the business and the software industry of the world.
As SQL provides the programmers with the medium to write codes that helps them to get
desired information from a database. It also helps the programmers to embed the queries with
other programming languages to create a complete application system. SQL is now used in

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almost every field of electronic data storage and processing. From government databases to e-
commerce websites on the internet, SQL has been the key solution.
3.2 Success of SQL and RDBMS
Since the introduction of the SQL language, the language and its tools has been
widely used. The language tools have been integrated with numerous other technologies to
produce large database systems. These systems are able to store huge chunks of data and
retrieve or modify them for analysis or other needs. Enterprises, since the initiation of this
language has been using SQL based relational database for internal data storage. It is widely
believed that the success of relational database and SQL is one of the greatest achievements
of IT. SQL, being a high-level data access language, fits suitably in its application for
parallelism in data warehousing and in the programmatic extensions for server based SQL
environments. It has been one of the main pillars of success factors for a wide variety of
consumer applications. These range from simple departmental software applications to
critical transaction or calculation processing based applications. Database vendors, in order to
respond to the competitive thrust, they continually tend innovate their SQL implementations.
Over the years, SQL has produced several application versions through the first IBM DB2,
MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle SQL Plus and MS SQL Server. Web developers prefers
MySQL and PostgreSQL whereas commercial platforms are more inclined towards the use of
MS SQL server. However, the large corporates and organizations stick to their use of the
Oracle SQL database, as these can run on PCs and large mainframe machines as well (Arora
& Gupta, 2012).
3.3 Failure tasted by SQL in the recent past
This demand due to technological complexities have led to the need for newer tools
and techniques. The gradual increase in the size of data collection was slowly turning out to
be a threat for an SQL based relational database to handle. McAfee et al. (2012), states that
this is the era of Big Data. Big data is the data that is collected from consumers and other
real-time environments in order to make complex analysis. Heavy chunks of data are stored
every day. Data such as these are needed to be stored on mapping-database. SQL and its
relational approach fails here (Madden, 2012).
3.3 Influencing the next generation languages
The SQL language has led the path for development. It had brought about a
renaissance in database management. However, since the early years of the past decade, it
was time for the NoSQL database to flourish. This form of DBMS software and tools allowed
lot more flexibility for big data management in the modern days. They do not use relational
tabular structure and can hence store massive data bulks. These also provide innovative
analytics tool (Sharma & Dave, 2012). The graph-database uses nodes to hold data and can
extend infinitively by adding paths (Batra & Tyagi, 2012).
However, modern trends show that the SQL based approach is being adapted back
into the IT industry. The traditional query language has influenced Amazon RDS, Microsoft’s
Azure Database and Google Cloud SQL. The SQL interfaces continue to thrive on top of the
Apache Spark or Hadoop platforms. SQL is widely used nowadays to store XML documents
now (Schweinsberg & Wegner, 2017).

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4. Analysis of SQL
4.1 Strength and weaknesses
The strengths of SQL can be profoundly written. They are as follows:
4. It provides all the necessary semantics to store, modify and retrieve necessary data
from a relational database.
5. It is efficiently used in enterprise-based database. Several systems are now being
updated and built to give SQL a rebirth (Evans, Lloyd & Pierce, 2012).
6. The NoSQL platforms have been a headache for many developers. Each NoSQL
database had their unique language and framework. This gets complex at times.
However, with SQL everything was under one roof. In addition, the SQL language
has been tested for years and have been used widely all over unlike the NoSQL
database, which are not developed completely yet.
7. SQL queries offer high speed data handling and the SQL standards are well
established.
8. Users of SQL are also allowed to make multiple views of the database structure.
However, there are its negative aspects too. The weakness of SQL are as listed below:
1. Dealing with huge chunks of modern day big data is still a problem.
2. It is also considered difficult to interface by novice users.
3. The cost of some renowned SQL database platforms are too high.
4.2 Design trade-offs
SQL gives its users the assistance of indexes. Indexes makes the execution of queries
faster however, slows down the updates. This also requires extra storage space for storing
these indexes.
5. Conclusion
From the above report, it can hence be concluded that the advent of technology, has
however gone a bit harsh on the Structured Query Language, but could not replace it
completely. The SQL has been a necessary language for almost every enterprise storage and
IT analysis uses. The features of the language allows users to store data, modify them and
retrieve the same from the database. The retrieving of data can be done using the conditional
SQL queries or scripts. SQL has been widely used by integrating it with other design
languages to produce database-enabled applications. Over the recent decade, the language has
had to be remoulded in order to match the updating scenario. NoSQL database came into
effect in order to handle rising demand of big data management. Nevertheless, SQL still has
its grabs on the IT industry and certain development companies are rebuilding their systems
to support SQL-based DBMS.

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