Obtaining SQL Standards

While it would make sense to have public standards available for free, ANSI and ISO both charge money to obtain SQL and other standards. Nonetheless, if one is curious about the actual wording of the standards, they can be found and purchased at the http://www.ansi.org/ and http://www.iso.org/ web sites.

SQL Pronunciation

The 1986 ANSI SQL standard declared the official pronunciation of SQL to be “es queue el”. Despite this, many people, especially those who are not technically savvy, pronounce SQL like the word “sequel”.

This has been the subject of much discussion in the SQL and database communities, and despite the “sequel” pronunciation being an irritant to passionate database technologists, that incorrect pronunciation has remained in common use.

As an aside, it is interesting to note that the official IBM System R acronym for what we now call SQL was once SEQUEL (pronounced “sequel”), which was a shortened version of Structured English Query Language.

However, the acronym was changed to SQL, simultaneously removing the word “English” from the acronym, because SEQUEL was a trademark of the Hawker Siddeley, an aircraft manufacturer.

SQL Portability

SQL database platforms tend to implement the SQL standard in different ways. For example, the SQL date and time data types are sometimes omitted in favor of proprietary solutions.

PostgreSQL notoriously contains a number of custom data types; for instance, it provides an entire range of data types that define geometric objects (e.g. box and line). These geometric object types are not necessarily available in other database systems, so the database developer who uses those types may be “locked in” to PostgreSQL.This situation would arise if converting the geometric object types to another type usable by a different database would consume too much time or be altogether impossible.

An argument typically made against complaints about SQL’s lack of portability is that the SQL standard, despite being long and complex, is not completely defined and, in some cases, is ambiguous.

Thus, the developer of the database system is left to decide how to implement certain features, like indexes and custom data types. These non-standardized implementations of features are often incompatible with other SQL database systems and lead to the lack of portability.