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It's slightly more likely that modern SQL is the byproduct of several query language specifications accelerated to ludicrous speeds and set to collide with each other. Out one end of the apparatus, SQL-86 emerged.

A little known fact about this experiment: the residue splattered along the interior of the apparatus was recovered and named LDAP.

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LDAP is a stripped down version of the X.500 directory, but I wasn’t aware that had anything to do with SQL. X.500 is hierarchical, not relational, and it doesn’t have a query language as such - http://sec.cs.kent.ac.uk/x500book/Chapter.5/Chapter5b.htm#5.... - neither did the original version of LDAP (RFC 1487 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1487 RFC 1488 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1488). The text representation of filters didn’t turn up until RFC 1960 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1960.html (1996) and it’s just a rendering of the ASN.1 structure.

I thought SQL descended relatively straightforwardly from SEQUEL.

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