A more interesting question to me is "how did SQL get so <i>unpopular</i> all of a sudden?" It seems to me it went like this:<p>1. modern programming frameworks all abstracted away SQL because people found it hard to understand<p>2. SQL written by ORM layers in these frameworks is slow. So people decided this was because RDBMS are slow.<p>3. So people decided to stop using RDBMS and use object-oriented data stores instead (which is faster, unless you have relational queries, which a large number of simple web applications do not)<p>4. Then when they started needing relational queries again, they started building complicated custom layers on top of their object stores to handle this<p>I figure sometime in the future somebody will publish a "brilliant" article called "Save yourself thousands of lines of object-manipulation code... by using RDBMS!" and suddenly SQL will be "popular" again.<p>I'm the first to admit that the default approach to web development for the past 10 years has been "slap all your data into mySQL, then start writing code". It works in a very, very large number of cases, but it's not super-efficient. It never claimed to be. It was just really easy and quick to write.<p>Now tools are growing up that let you solve these sorts of problems without using RDBMS, and that's great: the huge number of apps that don't need RDBMS can stop using SQL, and let us SQL junkies get on with our lives :-)
The post's argument appears to be that SQL (by which he means relational databases, as noted in the comments) are popular because implementing ACID is too much trouble, and because dealing with random file access is confusing.<p>It sounds like it <i>never even crossed his mind</i> that the relational model is a good fit for some problems. Wow.
My first thought was "Popular compared to what? What was the alternative?"<p>I was expecting to see hierarchical databases, OODBs and alternate query languages mentioned. The claim for "Distaste" for SQL is odd and vague. I agree with the first point - "Relational databases are ACID and that's powerful" but I ask "so what, where's the distaste?"<p>People who know a bit about RDBMSs know that they do a lot of heavy lifting for you. Is the point that a younger generation don't know that? What are they teaching kids in college these days?<p>Massively parallel data storage systems are in vogue now, bacause of the very the few very popular web apps that need to scale a lot horizontally, and SQL databases don't really deal with that. But that's not "How SQL got popular". Maybe it's why some have forgotten.
SQL is popular because it was the query language that was available in the Oracle and IBM relational databases, which were the first relational database products to come to market. SQL subsequently became an ISO standard. Eventually all relational database vendors switched to SQL. Other DBMSs (Ingres, Informix, Postgres) originally used QUEL which was thought by many to be superior to SQL eventually switched as SQL became dominant/the standard. (Although QUEL can still be used with Ingres). There may be other reasons, but I think that in large part these are the reasons why SQL is dominant today.<p>Relational databases became popular because the declarative high level query language was less time consuming to write queries in than earlier non-relational database.<p>SQL is far from the perfect query language though. It's syntax is often bizarre and confounding, and has many non relational extensions (column ordering, duplicate tuples in a relation).
There seems to be some confusion between SQL, ACID(Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability), and a RDBMS. And it would have been nice, as StrawberryFrog notes to see these concepts compared to OODB and other query languages.<p>Missing is the concept that SQL is really quite powerful.
SQL didn't really become popular until companies started believing in the benefits of moving their applications from homogeneous mainframe and timesharing systems to distributed heterogeneous client/server networks.