Re: Dreaming About Redesigning SQL

seunosewa_at_inaira.com (Seun Osewa) writes:
> Quote from
> http://www.mcjones.org/System_R/SQL_Reunion_95/sqlr95-Prehisto.html
>
> "We knew sort of peripherally that there was some work going on in the
> provinces, in San Jose. There was this guy Ted Codd who had some kind
> of strange mathematical notation, but nobody took it very seriously.
> Ray Boyce was hired at about this time, and we kind of got into this
> game called the Query Game where we were thinking of ways to express
> complicated queries. But actually before the Query Game started, I had
> a conversion experience, and I still remember this. Ted Codd came to
> visit Yorktown, I think it might have been at this symposium that Irv
> alluded to. He gave a seminar and a lot of us went to listen to him.
> This was as I say a revelation for me because Codd had a bunch of
> queries that were fairly complicated queries and since I'd been
> studying CODASYL, I could imagine how those queries would have been
> represented in CODASYL by programs that were five pages long that
> would navigate through this labyrinth of pointers and stuff. Codd
> would sort of write them down as one-liners. These would be queries
> like, "Find the employees who earn more than their managers."
> [laughter] He just whacked them out and you could sort of read them,
> and they weren't complicated at all, and I said, "Wow." This was kind
> of a conversion experience for me, that I understood what the
> relational thing was about after that."

... some conjecture that SQL was chosen as a TLA (three letter acronym) in competition with QBE (query by example) from YKT: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002e.html#44 SQL wildcard origins? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002o.html#70 Pismronunciation

i have some memory of QBE presentation in cambridge in the early to mid 70s ... in advance of some amount of the System/R stuff.

-- 
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ 
Internet trivia 20th anv http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm