23 years with SQL — What was old is new again

It was 1995 and I had just moved to San Francisco, CA from Boulder Colorado. I had a fresh new job working on a project to link CAD drawings with SQL databases (Watcom SQL Anywhere). Fast forward 23 years — and here I am, still typing a language invented in the ‘70’s into an editor. Just about everything in the data management world has changed since then, except SQL. It is still thriving. What the hell?

I used to work right behind this bldg when I was at Backflip (doing SQL) and we would get sandwiches in the back of Old Navy for lunch, yes, they had a sandwich shop *inside* the store. Photo by Alex Bierwagen on Unsplash

SQL roots

My fascination with Structured Query Language (SQL) has always been the simple declarative nature of it. Ask for what you want to see, and you get it. I should add, I love that most SQL implementations are well documented — rich and deep documentation. There are functions for just about everything!

It was my first week at Match.com and I was asked to implement “sounds like” in a SQL procedure for a feature we were working on.We used Oracle at the time, and the engineering lead handed me a Knuth book and said to get to work. I came back in 15 minutes and said I was done, and it’s checked in, he can test it. Much to his suprise it worked. I had simply looked in the Oracle documentation and realized it was already implemented as the soundex() function. We laughed —But I am still not sure if he thought more or less of me that day.