Back in May 1974, Donald Chamberlin and Raymond Boyce published an awesome paper to read on SEQUEL. This was a structured query language that could be used to manage and sort data easy in software or web application. They had to make a change in the 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 part of the 1970s.

Structured Query Language (SQL) is now officially 50 years old. The programming language was designed and then adopted by databases. While it has continued to grow and develop as a way to manage and interact with data. According to the study by Stack Overflow, it is the third most popular language used by professional programmers on a regular basis. Just 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.

When you look at other older programming languages being used today, the likes of COBOL (launched in 1959) and FORTRAN (first compiled in 1958) are still going, too. While they can lead to well-paying jobs these days, they are linked to existing legacy deployments rather than newer and more exciting projects to develop. SQL, on the other hand, is still being used as part of work around AI, analytics, and everyday software development. It continues to be the standard for how we interact with data on a daily basis.

Why is SQL still so important?

When you take a look at SQL, you may ask why it has survived for so long — heck, you can even say that it has thrived — for 50 years now! It is definitely not the easiest programming language to learn, as it has a highly specific and absolute syntax that is very much of its time.

The user experience around SQL can be challenging for new developers to even pick up easily. Alongside this, every database vendor has to support SQL, but each also will have their own unique quirks or nuances in how they implement this support. As a result of these quirks and nuances, your approach for one database may not translate to another database easily, leading to both more work and more support requirements.

To make matters even worse for a developer, it is easy to make mistakes in SQL that can have real and potentially catastrophic consequences if something goes wrong. As an example, missing a WHERE clause in your instructions can cause you to delete an entire table rather than carrying out the transaction you want, leading to lost data and recovery work. Checking your logic and knowing how things work in practice is a absolute requirement with working with SQL. 

So why is SQLstill the leading way to work with data today? Just 50 years after it was first designed and released? The SQL programming language is based on strong mathematical theory, so it continues to perform effectively and support the use cases it was designed for. The truth is that when you combine SQL with relational databases, you can easily map the data that you create — and even the way or how you manage that data — to many business practices in a way that is reliable, effective, and scalable. For me to put it simply, SQL just works, and no replacement option has measured up in the same way so far.

As an another example, SQLwas the first programming language to return multiple rows per a single request statement. This makes it way easier to get data on what is taking place within a set of data — and as a result, within the business and its applications — and then turn it into something the business can use. At the same time, SQLmade it easier to compartmentalize and segregate information into different tables, and then use the data in those tables for specific business tasks, such as putting customer data in one table and manufacturing data in another. The ability to perform transactions is the backbone of most processes today, and SQL made that possible at scale.

Another important reason for the success of SQL is that the language has always moved with the times. From its relational roots, SQL has added support for JSON documents, and for XML and YAML over the years. This has kept SQL up to speed with how developers want to interact with data. Now, SQL can even be combined with vector data. This allows developers to interact with data using SQL but carrying out vector searches for generative AI applications.

What is coming next for SQL?

There have been several attempts to replace SQL in the past. Most notably was the NoSQL (Not Only SQL) databases were developed to replace relational databases. This was to get away from the traditional models of working with and managing data at scale. However, at the same time, rather than replacing SQL, these databases added their own SQL-like languages that replicated some of the methods and approaches that SQL has ingrained into how developers work.

In the past, the natural language processing advocates have called for new methods that do away with the SQL standard and clunky approach. However, at the same time again, these attempts have ended up with methods that were just as clunky as what they tried to replace. This means that they were led to them being sidelined or ignored.

Artistical Intelligence (AI) may take on more writing SQL for developers. This also includes the large language models have been exposed to large quantities of SQL code as part of their training. However, while this approach may develop and become more popular in the near future, it still relies on SQL for the actual interaction with those sets of data and to deliver the results back to the user. If anything, this will likely make SQL more important for the future, not less, even though it will be less visible to the developer.

Even if SQL ends up moving behind a curtain in the future, it will continue to play a critical role in how we interact with and even use data. With such a huge percentage of all our IT systems relying on data to function, SQL will not be going away any time soon as far as I can see.

So, let’s celebrate SQL officially turning 50, and consider how we can continue to develop and use the programming language in the future.

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