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Comment by larrydag | Hacker News Reader

MySQL is the same way. A lot of people say My-sequel but I think its supposed to be my-ess-que-ell

PostgreSQL is the fun one out because they officially say it is Postgres-Q-L.

The "it's always S-Q-L and never `sequel`" is IBM's fault and an early trademark infringement issue in computing. (IBM was told it couldn't call it "SEQUEL" by an aircraft company.)

For anyone curious about the trademark infringement, I hunted down the excerpt from the book that Wikipedia uses as a source (a book called Databases Demystified) and this is what it says in the book:

>> The forerunner of SQL, which was called SEQUEL (for Structured English Query Language), first emerged in the specifications for System R, IBM’s experimental relational database, in the late 1970s. However, two other products, with various names for their query language, beat IBM to the marketplace with the first commercial relational database products: Relational Software’s Oracle and Relational Technology’s Ingres. IBM released SQL/DS in 1982, with the query language name shortened to “SQL” after IBM discovered that “SEQUEL” was a trademark of the Hawker-Siddeley Aircraft Company. When IBM released its next generation RDBMS, called DB2, the SQL acronym remained. To this day, you will hear the name pronounced as an acronym (S-Q-L) and as a word (see-quel), and both are considered correct pronunciations.

I was hoping for a bit more interesting or detailed story.

I typically go with just "postgres" for phonetic pronunciation. Not sure how else it would be done; "postgres sequel?"

I've heard Postgres pronounced as if it were French. "Postgree."

I've heard that, but assumed it came from splitting up the name as "Postgre"+"SQL"; if you leave off the SQL part you get a word ending in E, and "postgreh" can't be right, can it? :)

Which is why I've also heard developers that either assumed the 'g' was silent or a transposition problem and you get "poster SQL", "postreg SQL", or worst of all "posgret SQL".

Somewhere, I believe in an HN comment, I saw a Postgres developer say that one of the biggest regrets of the project naming was capitalizing that "shared S".

I go with psql personally

genuinely not sure if you are joking or not, but that's not the same thing as postgres! :)

Postgres queue ell

> they officially say it is Postgres-Q-L.

I always interpreted it as Post-gr-S-Q-L. Which is basically the same thing but makes more sense to me because it’s as if the name had a silent “e”.

i'm weirded out by the fact that i always use the “official” pronunciations for all these products

We need a normal form for pronouncing and naming relational databases.

I’m half joking but it might alleviate people from being confused.

I thought the norm was to pronounce SQL as "sequel" in Microsoft products and "ES-QUEUE-EL" in every other context

The norm is to pronounce it by how likely you think you might get yelled at for trademark infringement by a holding company of the assets of an old aircraft company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawker_Siddeley

The name confusion is all IBM's fault.

> Chamberlin and Boyce's first attempt of a relational database language was Square, but it was difficult to use due to subscript notation. After moving to the San Jose Research Laboratory in 1973, they began work on SEQUEL. The acronym SEQUEL was later changed to SQL because "SEQUEL" was a trademark of the UK-based Hawker Siddeley Dynamics Engineering Limited company.

So that trademark has been un-revivable since 2005... long past time to start saying "sequel" for real :)

I preferred to call it "Squeal Server."

Absolutely. Squealer for short.

I looked it up, you're right, it is officially my-ess-que-ell. This leads to another question, how do you pronounce "NoSQL"? I couldn't find a convincing answer on the web. I used to say "sequel" for everything SQL related but clearly I was wrong.

"red iss"

Noskul, rhymes with nostril

my-ass-que-ell is the way to go

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