Hacker News

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Speaking to The Register, Chamberlin said Codd's approach was a departure from the prevailing thinking in data systems from the 1970s, and would require a new language.

After moving from the east coast to IBM's San Jose Research Laboratory in 1973, Chamberlin and Boyce joined the team for System R.

"Chamberlin and Boyce basically turned SQUARE into a language you could type on a keyboard, but it had this nested structure to it," Stonebraker explained to The Register.

Oracle, adopted SEQUEL and claimed to be the first commercially available relational system, and Ingres had a significant advantage over IBM, Stonebraker said.

But for Chamberlin it was the approval of national and then international standards bodies, and the adoption by US government purchasing authorities, which helped win the day for SQL.

As relational databases became more commonplace due to the success of Ingres and Oracle, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) decided to take an interest and look at the query languages.

The original article contains 1,771 words, the summary contains 161 words. Saved 91%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!