The Birth of SQL & the Relational Database

[@richchinnici6182]

As a much younger software engineer, I still remember this phrase I was taught regarding relational database development. The key, the whole key, and nothing but the key. So help me Codd.

[@robertbutsch1802]

Also, in Codd we trust.

[@jasuncionrodriguez2098]

I Love That!

[@talananiyiyaya8912]

lame

[@tesla6422]

@Bebtelovimab looking forward to the noML hype of the 2060s

[@samw5767]

I learned exactly the same phrase in my SQL systems SLIS course @ Univ of Western Ontario in 1989!

[@jayalmeida4887]

“Codd, despite having a fishy name “ 😂 😂

[@_skyyskater]

I came here for this comment 😂😂😂

[@feraudyh]

His worst enemies were two guys called Fisher and Hook.

[@klauszinser]

Made me smile, too. The video is well done.

[@cjsveningsson]

I came here to groan at that 😅

[@feraudyh]

@@cjsveningsson I love groanworthy bad puns.

[@SixTimesNine]

I once was interviewed for a senior development position with a major multinational bank with their database guru. He was the one man who knew how the bank managed all of its data. He revealed that they had just one database. It had 600 tables. There were no joins, no relationships, no structure; It was just a massive dumping ground. Trades, transactions, accounts, … everything. The goal was to take this unholy mess and redo something better, while keeping all the existing business units running without interruption. It was an Oracle database.

[@honor9lite1337]

Nice

[@alansmith5098]

BlackRock 👀?

[@evancourtney7746]

I don't feel so bad anymore, the one I work with is approaching 1900 tables and it still keeps referential integrity, mostly.

[@easydoesitismist]

Lol, ever seen just one table with 3 columns: name, value, type?. Barf city.

[@dameneko]

I recall working with such a DB dumping ground as a new hire at one of my previous jobs. Source data from a global company in the banking and payments space. It came with hundreds of mostly useless stored procedures and functions that were supposedly written around 2015, but contained zero proper joins in the code. My new colleagues were waiting for me to make snarky comments about it!

[@testboga5991]

Study math, fly bombers, invent the dominant database structure. What a life!

[@ergosum5260]

+Program differential equations for missles

[@Goofy8907]

Yes, to fly murder machines, how amazing

[@TheJoseph0012]

@@Goofy8907 Would you support the abolition of your country's air force?

[@hhouse99]

As a pre-SQL programmer, SQL was a game changer. Using SQL gave me a logical, abstract view of the data structure, significantly reduced my design and coding time, and allowed changes to the database structure without having to break code or migrate data. I used several systems on PCs like DBase and Firefox which had SQL database at their core. Also need to remember that systems back then were so constrained by CPU performance, memory storage, and disk capacity that SQL would have been too large to run on some of the early computers. Great video as always!

[@vulpo]

I think you meant to say "FoxBase" or "FoxPro."

[@atheistbushman]

@@vulpo FoxPro was derived from dBase which became popular on IBM pc's in the early 80s

[@zzbeasley]

@@atheistbushman dBase was an awesome tool on the PC.

[@Alan_UK]

@@zzbeasley Agreed. I first met dBase on an Osborne luggable with 5 1/4" floppy drives and no hard disk! Later used dbase on PC and I liked Superbase under DR DOS/Gem. I think Superbase used dbase for data storage with Superbase giving a GUI front end.

[@honor9lite1337]

Good

[@mx2000]

I'd argue that SQL is one of the most successful inventions of computer science, on the level of C or even more so. Nothing better has come up despite decades of attempts, and pretty much all complex datastores eventually support SQL as they grow.

[@jppagetoo]

Humankind is generating vast amounts of data. Making sense of it all is beyond what a relational database can do well. The next step is "big data" non-relational databases. There are no keys, there is no structure to the data. The goal is to find the relations, not order them in that way. It is where we are headed. A relational database is great for what we use it for and will be used that way for a long time to come, but big data will look information a new way for a new purpose.

[@chpsilva]

"Humankind is generating vast amounts of data. Making sense of it all is beyond what a relational database can do well"... did you ask ChatGPT to write this bunch of vague and disconnected catch phrases just to oppose the OP ? What would be the practical purpose of "making sense" of all data we are producing? Make a real life Matrix ?

[@tpower1912]

​@@chpsilva Cook his ass

[@jppagetoo]

@@chpsilva A comment section is not the place to have a deep discussion about big data. I don't see that I opposed the OP, I presented what the next generation of databases are about and where the research is going. I have spent my professional life programming SQL relational databases, I do it for a living. If you are interested in the big data concepts I am talking about do a google search. Big data is useful and yes, despite your reservations, it is something that matters.

[@ash-cn2oh]

I find it remarkable that it is the only widely used non-imperative language.

[@256byteram]

I had the privilege of digitising some Betamax tapes from the Australian Computer Society many years ago from the 10th Australian Computer Conference held in 1983. Chris Date, a relational database expert, gave a presentation on one of these tapes and made many claims about what the future would be for databases. "Like it or not, SQL is going to become a very important language. It might become an actual standard, and it almost certainly will become a de facto standard." The full speech is here kzbin.info/www/bejne/jJ-xk5eairKNh6s

[@gus473]

Awesome find! Thanks! 😎✌️

[@MePeterNicholls]

Thanks. (You needed a time base corrector inline with the signal)

[@256byteram]

@@MePeterNicholls I used one, a Key West Big Voodoo. It doesn't handle dropouts in the vertical blanking very well. The tapes were very degraded unfortunately.

[@MePeterNicholls]

@@256byteram ah 👍🏼 find one these days is hard enough too tbh

[@video99couk]

@@MePeterNicholls The biggest problem were dropouts. A digital timebase corrector used with a domestic video recorder is not going to help with that. Sure they can on studio machines like Umatic, Betacam, MII etc., but domestic machines lack the required RF output signal. However it might be that the particular player could have usefully had the DOC (dropout compensator) sensitivity adjusted, I recently showed that with a Beta machine on KZbin.

[@EduardoEscarez]

As a newish developer, of all videos, this was the most exciting to see when I saw the thumbnail. SQL has become one the foundational blocks of software development and even today, when all the competing NoSQL paradigms (MongoDB, Firebase, Redis, etc) have claimed a space in database management, we are coming back to SQL with new ideas thanks to PostgreSQL and SQLite related projects like Turso and libSQL. And I really like the image in 14:50 while distant in time is so relatable to my knowledge. A testament on how SQL stood the test of time and won. Really thanks Jon for this video.

[@brodriguez11000]

Part of Data-oriented programming.

[@agranero6]

The problem is that most NoSQL databases (Mongo is fully ACID but records aren't usually normalizaed each document has all data so this doesn't mean much and so multi document transaction were only introduced in Mongo 4 mere 4 years ago) aren't fully ACID (Atomicity, Consistensy, Integrity and Durability). For things like banking transactions are a must: the money that gets out of one account must get in on another or the transaction must rollback. Unstructured or partially unstructured data are a case for NoSQL, many NoSQL databases are very simple and good in replication, but at a cost of using GUIDs as the primary key (as a surrogate key) this is not always desirable. When you get billions of records that need integrity and complex queries (Mongo performance with complex queries is abysmal) that must be done fast SQL is a must (good part of my life I passed tuning badly designed and maintained databases, and if I got a Dollar for each time I heard this can't be done faster or this can't be done in SQL I would have double what I earned).

[@EduardoEscarez]

​@@agranero6 I agree with you, but my point really was that we are ending the era when NoSQL was trendy and "you have to use it to be cool" like many other bad ideas mostly in webdev (microservices for all, complex SPAs for everything, rewriting everything in the latest language, etc). Nowadays everybody is rediscovering that SQL in its many forms is a solid language with solid ideas. Even SQLite is becoming popular! 😜 For me, I'm in both sides: For small projects I'm happy with tools like Cloud Firestore, but for more complex projects nothing that good ol' SQL.

[@mx2000]

@@agranero6 this, so much

[@Chungus581]

Still can’t believe they named it “mongo” lmao

[@douglascodes]

SQL is so useful. And you can learn 90% of what you need in two weeks. There's a reason it's so ubiquitous.

[@nezbrun872]

Really enjoyed that, but then I do have a 35 year SQL career behind me. Furthermore, almost all of it was new to me despite my extended immersion. I have to be honest, when I hear Codd's name, I usually switch off: it's usually in relation to Codd's Rules, academic rules of thumb that in practice are nothing more than common sense and second nature in this line of work. I watched a video on them that I happened to stumble across a few months ago, and yes, it is all common sense codified into a set of rules. So I congratulate you in managing to do a 20 minute video on SQL without ever referring to Codd's Rules!

[@k9man163]

for our management information systems program in university we barely do the SQL behind these academic concepts and it's really dumb, I am currently building a .NET interface for a access database just so I can practically learn this stuff.

[@controlfreak1963]

Moral of the story: Concepts are great for awards but actual working code/products can make you rich.

[@Bestmann3n]

it's the moral of the story if your ideology revolves around the idea of making money.

[@fauxhound5061]

​@@Bestmann3nlet me guess, you're a socialist and think " money bad! Me no like! >:("

[@controlfreak1963]

@@Bestmann3n The moral still works if you just want awards.

[@aerialcombat]

"Codd, despite having a fishy name, did not want this." 😂😂😂😂

[@jonpattison]

There are literally billions of SQL databases in this world, yet very few people knew where or how it got started until now. Thanks again, Jon.

[@raylopez99]

There are billions of ignorant people too.

[@judewestburner]

I'd use the word 'care'.

[@michaelmoorrees3585]

At least now I know how SQL got its pronunciation ! Can't wait for the sequel ! 😊 ... and how Larry Ellison got his dirty mitts on things

[@RonJohn63]

_Lots_ of people know where and how SQL got started. They just had to graduate college before the rise of Java. Heck, I've still got a Relational Databases textbook in a box somewhere.

[@mercster]

Yeah if only knowledge were stored somewhere other than KZbin... WAIT A MINUTE! 🤦‍♂

[@yxx_chris_xxy]

Database researcher and university professor here: Very good presentation as usual, though it of course ends with the state of things in the mid 1980s and a lot has happened since, not just in academia but also in industry. As early relational DMBS go, IBM's System R (which has been alluded to in the video but not named and whose DNA lives on to this day in IBM DB2) has had significantly higher impact and relevance than Ingres. Since you mentioned Boyce and Stonebraker, a number of others would have deserved mention at least as much, such as Jim Gray or Pat Selinger. Also, you added to my pain as an academic trying to attract young researchers into the field by making databases look real bland and boring (though important to business). Unfortunately, so many undergrad courses do the same. There is beautiful systems and theory research to be done, and there are interesting fundamental questions that arise here that are much cooler than anything mentioned in this video (though ultimately enabled by Codd).

[@brodriguez11000]

Maybe he will cover MUMPS.

[@willyhillstrom7816]

For sure, a database is way more than an Excell spreadsheet. With column based storage, data compression, and parallel processing. We get things like Google, a keyword database of the entire internet. And Twitter a database that adds records at a rate of 100's of gigabytes a second, all instantly searchable.

[@Martinit0]

Please post interesting fundamental question(s).

[@yxx_chris_xxy]

@@Martinit0 What is your background so I can gauge my wording?

[@lilylikesmarkies]

Not the original poster but curious; a bachelor's degree in mathematics with no theoretical exposure to databases, and 6 months experience programming with SQL.

[@Mateus01234]

Being a DBA student, it's interesting to see where all modern concepts began.

[@kondybas]

Do professors tell you that physical structure of the RDBMS is as important as logical structure? As a contractor DBA I make much more money from physical structure issues than from logical ones.

[@JimAllen-Persona]

@@kondybasAgreed to a point. Usually, the logical design isn’t that bad. My big problem is middleware… stuck threads, garbage collection, multi-threaded architecture and lack of commits.

[@Nick-hx1uz]

Your videos are so important. Documenting and popularising the foundational building blocks of our modern world.

[@adam872]

Agreed, this channel is a gold mine of technology history

[@mercster]

Information exists outside of youtube, ya know. Pretending youtube is some super-special, locked down knowledge store that will never go away and is vital to maintaining a record of history... come on now. 😏

[@broadestsmiler]

​@@mercster Asianometry helps spread this information to a wider audience without them actively searching for it. Almost every person watching this video had it recommended to them via the KZbin home page or through another recommendation method on the site. There are other sources for this information, but this video is a good way of pushing out that knowledge to a large number of people who would have not previously considered or cared about the topics discussed on the channel. Best regards.

[@mercster]

@@broadestsmiler I'm not taking anything at all away from Asionometry, whose videos I very much enjoy. What I'm getting at is, when you lavishly heap praise in an overly-enthusiastic, hyperbolic manner that doesn't really accurately reflect reality, you diminish the genuine value.

[@jfv65]

​@@mercsterNot everybody has the time to delve into historical documents. I see this channel as a low-treshhold gateway into the early history of the computer industry. Not overly theoretical yet very informative.

[@nekomakhea9440]

10 IQ: "S-Q-L" 100 IQ: "Sequel" 1,000 IQ: "Squeal" 10,000 IQ: "Squirrel"

[@futureworldhealing]

underrated

[@nicholasrobins2835]

S-Q-L (originally SEQUEL) had to change its name to S-Q-L due to an existing language called SEQUEL and subsequent trademark dispute. I try my best to use S-Q-L on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, SEQUEL other days, and "Squirrel" when I have had too much to drink.

[@Stadtpark90]

squirrel 😂 - I can laugh about that joke without an IQ of 10000. - I didn’t have to come up with it, I only needed to understand. Edit: on the other hand: it seems a bit unfair, as squirrels (allegedly) sometimes forget where they stored all of their seeds for the winter, thus enabling unintended growth of trees… (- „trees“ ?😂) Edit 2: maybe the 10000 wasn’t in the decimal system, but binary 😂

[@matneu27]

Wonder what DB model squirrels use to find their hidden hazelnuts again 😉

[@iceteazen]

ThePrimeagen: "skwel"

[@tom23rd]

I have to profess my love of this channel and your content. I don't know how I was lured into this channel at first, I'm not Asian, and I'm just a mere MSP technician who grew up in the 80s and 90s. But you always seem to hit the right note, and Sunday nights haven't been the same since. You're doing it right, sir. 🤩 I eat these videos up, and wanted to say "thanks".

[@thinkingcitizen]

its only called Asianometry because there's a focus on Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, Indian technology sector! the channel is not actually about asian culture lol

[@Old_Jack_Ketch]

It’s oddly addictive for reasons I can’t figure out. I usually set the videos to my ‘watch later’ list for when I’m driving my daily commute.

[@jfv65]

​@@Old_Jack_Ketchi agree. It is probably because the topics in the video's are not ancient history and still have relevance to this day. But even if you started studying or working in ICT you might have never heard of many contextual details in these vids but when you hear or see them you can often instantly relate them to personal experiences (at least i can) and that's entertaining. Greetings from ASML-city!

[@tom23rd]

@@thinkingcitizen I get that. I meant in terms of the initial draw for me, what made me pick this content, based solely on the name of the channel - It speaks to how genuinely interesting the selection of topics are. 😉

[@skypickle29]

Codd looks like Dirac. And the controversy between Bachman and Codd reminds me of Einstein and Bohr vis a vis quantum mechanics

[@t0rg3]

5:40 in CS, the “top” of the tree is its root, not the canopy as you depict it.

[@jangelbrich7056]

I like how You dig out filthy details: "Deliverability, Redundancy and Consistency of Relations stored in Large Data Banks" with the exact date on it +++

[@FrickFrack]

I knew Charlie Bachman and can confirm he was a stand up guy. Kind, patient, a good teacher and a good boss. I worked for him for a few years when he was promoting his entity-relationship model which was more abstract than the Hierarchical (IMS), CODASYL (IDMS) and Relational (DB2) models and was useful for porting and reverse engineering.

[@alexlefevre3555]

I work in a social work/SUD treatment agency, and we somewhat recently began working with a company that helped us get backend data out of the cloud database. I haven't worked with SQL since college... The last few months have been a blast, and believe you me, I've been able to flex comp sci skills in a very not comp sci industry haha.

[@broyojo]

ah yes we need an human organ database

[@raylopez99]

They have one already, but I hear in China you can jump to the top of the list by paying some money, and a bucket of organs will show up overnight.

[@robertjay9415]

your not a doctor 😂

[@piyh3962]

I'm in one and played a part in curing a man of bone cancer because of these databases

[@piyh3962]

Sign up for the marrow registry you cowards

[@bob_smite]

we do have one! its the human reference genome hg38!

[@rayoflight62]

Hello Jon, In my opinion, this is one of your best video. As a side hustle to my job, I've been writing in SQL for more than a decade. I'd read about how it come to be, but the story you tell is at another level. Thank you Anthony

[@ImHereFindMe]

No mention of C.J. Date, Codd's most fervent acolyte?

[@bretthagey7916]

SELECT * FROM AWESOME :-)

[@eriche9297]

Great video as always! I would love future videos on more modern SQL since the 1980s -> e.g. the breakout of OLAP vs. OLTP databases, SQL in the cloud, Presto, etc.

[@jrbergsten]

One hopes you do a video on IBM’s Query by Example and System R and how a salesman and programmer from Amdahl managed to start Oracle. Or not.

[@Dan-hw9iu]

Phenomenal video. The inoculation to being overwhelmed by a technology is to follow the simple ideas and history that built its complexity. You have a remarkable talent for leading audiences along those journeys. I hope that you'll take us on similar tours of these omnipresent, yet terrifying, tools that power our world. In the meantime, avoid dying of a brain aneurysm. Because evidently that's something I get to worry about now.

[@RoySATX]

My second cat, the last offspring of my first dilute Calico whose litter came while I was learning relational databases, was named SQL. A damned good cat, indeed.

[@henkondemand]

May he rest in peace

[@benjamin3044]

I'm in the "Esss Que El" camp. Good to know Asianometry is the "See quell" camp.

[@Martinit0]

Jon missed another opportunity to cement his brand by mispronouncing industry terms.

[@arnswine]

Gotta say I wish my dad was still around to appreciate this channel. As a historian and library scientist with most of his career transpiring before the internet explosion, he didn't really get to witness much refinement of video content. The variety and scope of the stories shared through Asianometry are just plain great... (Although I'm sure he would've griped about lack of formal reference summaries to back up details.)

[@vulpo]

Let's give a little credit also to Chris Date who somehow managed to document Codd's work in a form that mere mortals could understand.

[@bennettbullock9690]

I remember learning SQL in the early 2000's and dutifully memorizing that it was the unification of relational algebra and relational calculus. The fact that almost nobody would even bother to learn that today attests to how useful and intuitive SQL really is. The key was, I think, that they modeled it after regular English and the implicit set-theoretic operations in natural language - "select birthday from people where ...""

[@BurleyBoar]

Later on in my life I am finding a lack of great videos that bridge the human gap between the great ideas we need to learn and how and there they came from. It's so easy to give up because everything comes down some arbitrary decisions than are then later generalized and that's what wins out. I am one of those people who needs that back story to calm down the "Why this way??" questions in my head with out mastering something enough to know why. Not much point to this for others. Just engaging the algorithm with something more than "Thanks for another good video. I enjoyed it."

[@sporefergieboy10]

When I hear a black queen 👸🏿 I zip 🤐 my lips and listen 👂🏻

[@agranero6]

We usually prefer the term tree instead of network to avoid confusion with a computer network and because network is a wider concept (equivalent to a graph): networks don't have to be in tree form, they can for instance be semi-lattices for instance. Trees are good for seaching as we can traverse with simple algorithms and find a key in logarithmic time, if the tree is well balanced, and we can balance them for efficiency. In general graphs this can't be done. In your video you confuse related tables with trees: the trees in databases are assembled inside the indexes to the keys in the database. The relationship between tables doesn't need to be in the form of a tree and it usually is not.

[@KarlHamilton]

Larry Ellison has entered the chat

[@chpsilva]

One Rich A**hole Called Larry Ellison

[@46I37]

One Rich As.... Called Larry Ellison

[@memofromessex]

Having used SQL, I can only presume it was written by an idiot. I can use it, but it's the most painful thing I use fairly frequently - apart from Marketo (which could only been built in 1/2 a day of pure hate - why would the UI be so bad and provide wrong data?)

[@kingstonchi]

Great article. However, now that we have AI dealing with unorganized data in the trillions of trillions .. How is data sorting, storing and retrieval handled ? How different as compared with what discussed in this video, or different at all ? I guess when you can process, calculate, and move information millions of times faster than before, perhaps the previous schemes to make data easily found or related are no longer as essential ..

[@Bluelagoonstudios]

You forgot to mention the predecessor from SQL (that I learned), it was dbase IV, and it had already SQL implemented in it. I programmed a lot in dbase III and IV mostly for bookkeeping purposes. At that time, this was very powerful, but I quit programming when I was conscripted for the army. After my 3 years duty, I lost interest, unfortunately. But SQL isn't much different from the other products. And later in my Carrère working in BPCS I used my knowledge to create my own query's and forms to extract data out of the mass database. My boss didn't know much about databases and programming or making forms on that level. Enjoyed my work very much. Making things a lot more efficient. I remember saying to him, everything is there, you just have to know how to extract things that are relevant for you and the team. But I left the job because it became boring and other opportunity's that were better paid.

[@brianpederson2105]

SQL just goes on and on and shows no sign of being superceded. I'm convinced that Data is still using it on the Enterprise...

[@Zuranthus]

sometimes being a visionary isn't all it's cracked up to be, imagine going around the whole world trying to convince people you know of a better way but they're all too dumb or arrogant to see it...has happened so many times throughout history

[@jazzyniko]

Writing SQL queries is one thing. Designing a database is a complete different thing i guess 😅

[@sureshmukhi2316]

You bet!!

[@P-B-G_YT]

15:06 Nice shot of the Air North Hawker Siddeley from Whitehorse, Yukon. My home town.

[@bobdear5160]

I worked on databases on IBM mainframes. IMS was described as hierarchical, Total was a network database (you had two levels). I then came across early DB2 using Structured Query Language and of cause Codd’s relational database principles. I did a bit if work on Oracle and quite a lot using UDB (the djstributed version of DB2 for middle tier rather than mainframe systems. Interesting to see how other software sellers went about implementing Codd’s rules.

[@jimirving3235]

I interviewed with Oracle and three other Bay Area companies before moving there in 1981. Oracle was my second choice. It was a prototypical startup - but at the time, of course, it looked like a young and untested outfit. What might have been… (I had plenty of time and read E. F. Codd's papers at the not-so-busy consulting firm I signed with instead, and got heavily into databases later.)

[@roberthuff3122]

Next the history of dBase? 😅 Actually, it could be very interesting given its intersectional nature.

[@o0Donuts0o]

The thumbnail looks like Sean Connery. The name’s Ell. Esh Queue Ell.

[@punditgi]

Another first rate video! 🎉😊

[@raygumm]

Wake up babe Asianometry just dropped a new video

[@mrnarason]

Codd looks kinda like Paul Dirac in that photo

[@dr.fidelius2905]

I appreciate the label ‘vicious’ applied to Oracle as that is how they were described by Michael Stonebraker and colleagues, developers of Ingres, Postgres, etc. In the 1990s. Oracle would do whatever it took to get the business. (I worked as a programmer in the CS Division at UC Berkeley in the 1990s)

[@ergosum5260]

How did you know about my cardboard box, and can ww have a private meeting?

[@KomradZX1989]

Human organs!!! 😂😂😂

[@chopper3lw]

Nice vid. BTW Trees are traversed from the root(trunk) to the leaves, not from the leaves to the trunk (usually)

[@lincolnkarim1]

You do a great job researching historical pioneers. May I suggest that you try to locate some pioneers that are still alive. Look up Nils Lahr. I don't know what became of him, but he pioneered a lot of technology for finance data retrieving for television broadcasting. We worked together at CNN's Financial News (CNNfn), back in the 1990s. I knew him to be a brilliant man especially so because the Internet was very new and he had the foresight and knowledge,

[@JoseLopez-hp5oo]

Big thumbs up and thank you , databases often overlooked are the backbone of most system design. One of the first high school jobs was digitizing the music collection the national radio station into a DBase IV system. I then used my database programming superpowers to make a movie rental database back in the days when stores rented VHS tapes using Novell Netware and Btrieve. A lot of money to be made from database design in the 1980/1990s! It was the HTML of the era.

[@HT-zx8dn]

I worked as a SW developer for 30 years. I started with IMS, IDMS then DB2. DB2 relational DB is the best for design, development and serving the business.

[@JohnGotts]

I've been using SQL since September 1999. Database programmer has never been my formal title, but I have been one for 25 years this fall, in addition to my main programming job that's normally identified by the other programming language. It's been SQL the whole time, but the other language has gone from C to Perl to PHP to Java over the decades. What makes SQL different from other programming languages is that it's used by far more than just programmers. I've seen programmers write horrible SQL and non-programmers write terrific SQL. If you can wrap your mind around set calculus you'll become very good at SQL, and you don't need to be a programmer at all. Either way, practice helps. I was only what I would consider good at SQL after 15 years and I'm now fairly proficient at SQL such that I can jump right into any database get going.

[@thefamousdjx]

You dont need calculus to be good at sql lol. It was originally meant to be easy to get into and use for non tech people and its still that way. No need to overthink it its mainly Select, from and where and joins plus a bunch of other features that keep getting added to make life easier.

[@galvintjime]

A fantastic video as always, but I can’t help but worry about the company represented at @11:21. With no IT Support staff, what are they going to do when the database goes offline? 😬

[@stachowi]

HOW DO YOU DO IT?!

[@kevanschwitzer8585]

Fantastic video. Subscribed! Your content has a wonderful niche that needs filling!

[@kingeternal_ap]

Nice movie! Excited to see the SQL.

[@ccshello1]

SELECT Jon's special deer FROM * WHERE lives in Nara AND wears a Blue ear ring

[@martindurand5492]

Don't forget to add 22% for maintenance !-)

[@nekomakhea9440]

"The network model will never work, navigating records linked by pointers is just too complicated" Codd was quoted as saying, on a video delivered by the WWW.

[@artofcomputing-art]

The network model being the literal basis of physical representation of data in database engines: Bruh. Which is funny to think.. both of them were right, just not on the same level of abstraction

[@pedrolopez8057]

There's a reason it was discarded. I've worked on them and it is so much "flying by the seat of your pants".

[@ReturnToHopeCove]

My manager met Charlie Bachman in the 90s. I used to use his tool also called Bachman to write DDL and create DB2 tables. Video brought back memories.

[@peters972]

Boyce-Codd normal form baby.

[@nicejungle]

Bachman was a visionary, Cood a bookkeeper. As I'm currently learning neo4j, it seems obvious that graph databases as Bachman envisioned is the way for modern software and modern data representations.

[@captainkeyboard1007]

Microsoft Access became my favorite application computer program and Microsoft Word is my springboard due to my keyboarding skill. I learned to use a relational database program by myself after I purchased my first microcomputer in 2002. Mastering the table, query, report and then the form objects was practice and fun for me. I enjoy shows about databases and I just subscribed.

[@nufosmatic]

18:29 - "in those days..."? NUFOSMATIC'S LAW: every 18 months half of everything you know is obsolete...

[@nagasako7]

Ahhh yes My squirrel failure😊

[@hg2.]

Fantastic! I was in the programming business (struggling with IMS) when "Sequel" was just becoming available. ... Phew. "The rest is (Oracle) history."

[@rogerc7960]

In 1999 Jack Dorsey coded blogger, just a ftp on web AND sql backend. In 2006 he coded Twitter using graph database. Now he coded bluesky, which is vector database?

[@fredinit]

The RDBMS, as a method to store structured data, was brilliant. Well worth the A.M. Turing Award! SQL, as a language, was a throw-away* garage experiment let loose by IBM marketing. * See "Throwaway system - F. Brooks" Before someone with actual language design chops could give it a shave, haircut, and clean it up. Think about it.. you tell the interpreter what you want (SELECT) before where (WHERE), when WHERE tells the interpreter what SELECT can actually look like. It boggles the mind in how how tortuously bad it is on both the developers of the query and the interpreter.

[@lohphat]

Note that even though in the shadow of Oracle Corp in San Carlos, CA, the local airport's IATA code is SQL only by coincidence as the airport got its code in 1972. Long before the area was developed.

[@mrrolandlawrence]

wow hearing about Codd! jeeeze that takes me back to the 80s when i was a simple college student & my computer sciences teacher was telling me all about this interesting language. he was of course an ALGOL 68 man & me a humble assembler / dbase III guy.

[@theronwolf3296]

I'm retired now, but I did SQL development since about 1999. My favorite languages were WIDELY different: C++ and SQL

[@kenoliver8913]

18.30 - "two opposing ideas getting the same award so soon" (ie 10 years apart). That's nothing - famously the Nobel in economics was shared by Milton Friedman and Gunnar Myrdal for saying completely opposite things (Friedman being a market guy and Myrdal a socialist). Both appeared very amused at the awards ceremony.

[@kurtmueller2089]

All your videos are good, but this one was amazing. As someone who first learned SQL in 2004 (and who still pronounces it Es kju ell), I have never learned so much history about any technology than in this video. By the way, do you think that a video on the Memex by Vannevar Bush would fall into your area of expertise? It seems that every other GUI, knowledge retrieval system, hypertext and note taking system seems to sooner or later imitate the Memex, an invention from the 1930s or 1940s (depending on which paper you count)

[@treebardgenealogysoftware2577]

This is a great video. I recently wrote a satirical critique of genealogy software's GEDCOM tool which was created in 1984 and is still being used to transfer data among different genealogy software applications. My thesis was that if GEDCOM had been created a few years later, it would have been a SQL database instead of the hierarchical nesting of asymmetrical inconsistencies that it is. Unfortunately, hierarchical structure is what was tried first and GEDCOM still hobbles genealogy data transfer in 2024 while the rest of the world has adopted RDBMS decades ago.

[@PeteC62]

I remember learning about the various "normal forms" of the relational model in a course for my CS degree in 1981. Unfortunately, the lectures were incredibly dry and boring - the lecturer showed videos of herself on a TV while she just stood to the side. Many years later I used SQL in various DB products, memorably SQLIte on Android 😊

[@drjenschn]

The many-to-many relationship is actually one-to-one... It would be more characteristic if you had multiple "parents" of a more graph-like structure...

[@DavidFowlerPhotgraphy]

I programmed before SQL and after. No comparison in flexibility, Time to market of your design and product. Great Business value. Still the best for data management

[@brucereynolds7009]

For the IBM Series/1, before SQL, there was QBE (Query By Example), I believe on both the EDX and RPS platforms.

[@michaeldeloatch7461]

Insert into YT_Vids_I_Have_Watched ( Title, Content_Score, Presentation_Score) Values ('The Birth of SQL & The Relational Databse','A+','A+') ;

[@georgeh6856]

I knew that SQL came from IBM. I did not know that it came from IBM San Jose, where I worked many years ago, long after SQL was invented. If it was at the main IBM San Jose site, that site is not even there anymore. It has since been turned into houses and stores. I did, however, very briefly work with a guy there who had gotten a patent in the 1970s for RAID (redundant array of inexpensive/independent disks).

[@Law0086]

Even with this nice tech, data bases from large companies suck, and typically don't get used to it's 100% capability. Typically the more basic the better for the user, but an amount of complex information would never get saved. The plot thickens.

[@chrisliddiard725]

It seems to me Raymond F. Boyce, was to SQL what Steve Wozniak was to Apple. The key person who took a theory and turned it into a practical working solution. Codd was apparently the brains, with people skills enough to promote the idea, but projects of this kind can't exist without the grunt work of the coder.

[@geneballay9590]

Interesting, informative and well done, on a subject that I worked with for a number of years, but had not idea of 'the rest of the story'. Thank you for all the work and then sharing.

[@LucificNight]

Could I ask about something that was briefly touched on in the video? It's mentioned that there are banks & financial institutions that are still using older models/systems of databases. Are those older systems better somehow for their purpose, perhaps less flexible but can handle higher transaction volumes faster or something? Or would switching to RDBMS be 100% superior in every and all ways? I know that migration costs are a factor (blah blah greedy capitalists and all that), but was just curious if there were actual technical reasons for staying on those older systems.

[@nomadhgnis9425]

I find 60s and 70s being the golden age of database experimentation. They made all the mistake and eventually everything got standardized with the sql92 standard. Today databases have become a mutation of various meta code and binary integrations. Just imagine what future databases would look like. Nice video on the topic.

[@skypickle29]

'the key was 'enabling average people to ask more questions of their data, which meant more sales for IBM'. So now we have AI. Not only are we data agnostic, and structure agnostic. AI can write language agnostic queries. More questions from more average people on more data. Can we now teach AI to clean up data, honestly?

[@AlexandruVoda]

Not mentioning IBM System R and instead mentioning Oracle is a minus of this video. It is System R that influenced Oracle and it is because of the System R legacy that SQL has all the warts it has today. In a paralel universe some other relational system like BS12 might have been the granddaddy of RDBMSs.

[@jlp2011]

such a great expo of the genesis of early dbs. i do wonder if GQL the new graph db lang doesnt have some of that deep nav issue. mind you I once argued with a colleague that a single monolithic 43-page (yes, pages of code) sql query was unmanageable (unions, subqueries, coalesces…)

[@TimothyKane-ez4qw]

Relational Databases + SQL made ERP systems possible and inevitable. Then the internet made those ERP's offered as SaaS possible. The downside is that it creates juicy fruit for hackers and ransomware artists.

[@parthasur6018]

IMS uses a hierarchical data model, IDMS uses a network model, and TOTAL is an inverted file model. OK? (I have used all three).

[@judewestburner]

I would love a video on Visual Basic. I have a belief that VB is awesomely important both for applications running today especially in business but also for being one of the first examples of a minimal learning curve way to create applications really cheaply, especially in contrast to next with objective c

[@kyriosity-at-github]

Basic: "We let dumb folks program."

[@MultiMojo]

I miss Visual Basic 😭

[@rustycherkas8229]

It may be "elitist", but... While conquering C, decades ago, I couldn't get past the literal meaning of the name of my first language: BASIC The name stands for "Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code". Can't remain only a "Beginner" forever. Can't imagine life without a pointer... Pointless existence... 🙂

[@ByTheRiverHelge]

​@@kyriosity-at-github Yep, there's a reason no killer apps were ever written in BASIC.

[@judewestburner]

@@rustycherkas8229 I know personally of at least three (maybe four but hazy memory) companies selling applications built using VB in active development to this day which started life as one-man bands. People may scoff at that language and look down on their work because of it, and those one-man band folk will be crying into their champagne tonight in their private south of france villas.