Meeting criteria set by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), SQL lets you access and manipulate databases. This particular ANSI standard is somewhat flexible, in that it accepts many different versions of the SQL language, as long as certain major commands are cross-supported, like SELECT, UPDATE, DELETE, INSERT, WHERE, etc. Of course, most SQL database programs also have their own proprietary extensions in addition to the SQL standard! The big developers in the SQL league are Microsoft, Oracle, MySQL, IBM and Sybase. These modern day database systems are based on a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS). As is the norm in data storage systems, the data in RDBMS is stored in objects called tables, which, as we know, is a set of columns and rows. All said and done, we come around full circle to realize that SQL is an integral part of Business Intelligence.
As the online guide W3Schools (see reference 1 below) says, “SQL can execute queries against, retrieve data from, insert / update/ delete records in a database. It can create new databases, new tables, stored procedures and views in a database, under preset permission.” Its primary query languages are T-SQL and ANSI SQL.
The industry norm remains the SQL Server developed by Microsoft, growing from the SQL Server 1.0 released in 1989 through the 2005 version which integrated data management Extract Transform Load (ETL) tools like SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), analysis systems like Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) and several messaging technologies. This version included support for managing Extensible Markup Language (XML) data as well as integration of Common Language Runtime (CLR). The next version say daylight in 2008, by which time multi-media was the rage. As expected, Microsoft breasted the tape first, with the stated aim of making it’s hitherto codenamed product “Katmai” the market leader. Katmai was programmed to make data management self-tuning, self organizing, and self maintaining, using the concept of SQL Server Always On technologies to provide near-zero downtime. On the multimedia front, it would be able to support data to cater for digital media formats for pictures, audio, video and other multimedia.
Progressive enhancements in 2009/11 saw a technology leap, with better compression, the introduction of PowerPivot for MS Excel and SharePoint and other complex improvements. The latest SQL server developed is the 2012 version, which is simplified technically and features programmability, performance and security upgrades by several degrees. The cloud-based version of Microsoft SQL Server was developed as software as a service (SASS) on the Azure Services Platform. All servers are written in C++, can use OS from Windows XP onwards and are available in ten languages.