SQL (commonly expanded to Structured Query Language — see History for the term's derivation) is the most popular computer language used to create, modify, retrieve and manipulate data from relational database management systems. The language has evolved beyond its original purpose to support object-relational database management systems. It is an ANSI/ISO standard.

SQL is commonly spoken in initialism-style ess-cue-el (see English alphabet) — regarded as more formal — or in a phonetically-amalgamated form that mirrors the English word sequel. Concerning the names of major database products (or projects) containing the letters SQL, each has its own convention: MySQL is commonly pronounced my ess-cue-el; PostgreSQL is expediently pronounced postgres; and Microsoft SQL Server is commonly spoken as Microsoft-sequel-server.

History

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An influential paper, "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks", by Dr. Edgar F. Codd, was published in June, 1970 in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) journal, Communications of the ACM, although drafts of it were circulated internally within IBM in 1969. Codd's model became widely accepted as the definitive model for relational database management systems (RDBMS or RDMS).

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