Markus Winand

@winand.at

1339 Followers 67 Following

SQL Renaissance Ambassador. Author, Trainer, Coach. PhD in Common Sense. Creator of http://use-the-index-luke.com and http://modern-sql.com.

Chart showing the degree of support for SQLs "IS JSON" test: Full H2 support since 1.4.200. Full PostgreSQL support since 16. Full MariaDB support since 12.3.2. Partial Oracle DB support since 21c.
Infographic showing that PostgreSQL supports FILTER since 2015, followed by H2 and SQLite in 2019, DuckDB 2024 (first tested release) and now Oracle in 2026.
Picture of a coffee mug featuring the "Use The Index, Luke!" mascot.
A bunch of things were happening at about this time that I think we ought to mention just in passing. One was that we had to change the name of our language from SEQUEL to SQL. And the reason that we had to do that was because of a legal challenge that came from a lawyer. Mike, you probably can help me out with this. I believe it was from the Hawker Siddeley Aircraft Company in Great Britain, that said SEQUEL was their registered trademark. We never found out what kind of an aircraft a SEQUEL was, but they said we couldn’t use their name anymore, so we had to figure out what to do about that. I think I was the one who condensed all the vowels out of SEQUEL to turn it into SQL, based on the pattern of APL and languages that had three-lettered names that end in L. So that was how that happened.
The name “SQL” is correctly pronounced “ess cue ell,” instead of the somewhat common “sequel”.
Visualization of drifting: The first 10 rows now might not be the first 10 rows later.
Developers will not necessarily understand how to manage database transactions effectively when using JDBC. Thus, if handling transactions manually, developers may not start them where appropriate or not at all. The same problem applies to issuing commits or rollbacks where necessary. To get around this problem, the auto-commit mode in JDBC provides a way to execute SQL statements with transaction management handled automatically by the JDBC driver.