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Business Intelligence<br>A Short Story About SQL’s Biggest Rival<br>A short story about SQL's better rival: Michael Stonebraker's storied query language, QUEL.<br>October 07, 2020 &middot; 7 min read &middot; Cedric Chin

The year was 1983. Larry Ellison, over at a tiny company called Oracle, was focused on the fallout of a buggy database product rewrite. In the rearview mirror, catching up quickly, was computer science professor and eventual database legend Michael Stonebraker.<br>In his book, Softwar, author Matthew Symonds tells the story like so:<br>Ellison was still not giving much of his attention to what was or wasn’t happening in sales. As far as Ellison was concerned, overwhelmingly the most important contribution he could make to Oracle’s success was to concentrate on making the product better. He simply didn’t regard himself as competent to concern himself with all the other things that a CEO is supposed to be responsible for. To some at Oracle, Ellison’s approach was one of enlightened delegation. “You could say that,” he says. “But it was closer to abdication than delegation.”<br>In fact, Ellison had every reason to concentrate on the product. Mike Stonebraker had taken the Ingres relational database project he had overseen at the University of California at Berkeley and formed a company around it called Relational Technology, Inc. Although a commercial version of Ingres had come to market a little later than Oracle, Stonebraker’s outfit was growing faster than Ellison’s. In 1984, Oracle’s sales had doubled to $12.7 million, while Ingres, as RTI was increasingly known, had tripled its sales to $9 million. Ellison says, “They were really kicking our butts. They were catching up fast because we had just rewritten our database product and we were having software quality problems. Sound familiar?”<br>The Berkeley team at Ingres had had much more time to refine their user language, QUEL, than Oracle had to develop SQL, and many relational experts thought it was intrinsically a superior language. Ellison says: “Maybe QUEL is better than SQL. Maybe French is better than English? It didn’t matter: English and SQL were going to win.” What Ellison was most worried about was the sheer engineering talent at Ingres. “It had become painfully clear to me that our development organization wasn’t good enough to keep up with the team at Ingres. So we had to rebuild it. If Stonebraker was hiring the best kids from UC Berkeley, we would hire the best kids from CalTech, MIT, and Stanford. We would also recruit the very best experienced programming talent in the Valley. In a real coup we hired a superb team from Xerox PARC. One of those guys, Derry Kabcenell, was among the most important people ever to work at Oracle. Thanks to Derry and the new engineering team he led, we overcame the software quality problems in Oracle Version 3. He delivered a superior database product—a product we could be proud of—a product that would kill Ingres. We called it Oracle Version 4.”

Of course, this story is simplistic at best. Oracle Version 4 was a good product — certainly better than Oracle Version 3, which was released to the market with more bugs than a discarded pomelo. But it didn’t win because it was technically superior to Ingres. It won because IBM was powerful, and because Stonebraker made a mistake.<br>Later that year, after months of persuasion by IBM and Oracle, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) declared SQL the standard relational database language. Symonds writes:<br>With the solidity of Version 4 and Oracle’s increasingly aggressive sales force, Ingres was hard pressed to maintain its momentum, but the real threat was the decision of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), supported by IBM, to declare SQL the standard relational database language. Mike Stonebraker of Ingres didn’t even bother to show up at the committee meeting to make the (quite strong) case for adopting QUEL because he was ideologically opposed to setting technology standards. It was the behavior of an intellectually arrogant academic rather than a prudent businessman protecting the interests of his company. Ellison says, “Stonebraker invented QUEL and stuck with it like a proud father, while IBM and Oracle supported the SQL standard. Lack of SQL support hurt Ingres badly. But so did lack of portability and read consistency. And...