Happy 50th birthday to SQL!

Structured Query Language is an incredibly popular computer language used to query a huge variety of databases today. But it was described by Chamberlin and Boyce in a paper published in 1974.

They may have saved us from having to query databases using its predesccor, SQUARE, which had much trickier sounding concepts of bound variables, quantifiers and first order predicate calculus.

TIL: the reason many people pronounce SQL as “sequel” perhaps relates to the fact it was actually called SEQUEL - “Structured English QUEry Language” until they noticed another company had a trademark on SEQUEL. Wikipedia claims the modern-day correct pronunciation to be simply its letters: S-Q-L. But I doubt anyone involved would be confused either way.