paul s-306273 (7/2/2013)
Wasn't SEQUEL an IBM language (and hence trademarked). I believe that's why we use' es queue el' to differentiate.
No, SeQUEL wasn't trademarked by IBM - the trademark SEQUEL belonged to Hawker-Siddley, and that's why the language isn't called SEQUEL.
IBM originally intended to call the language "Structured English Query Language", SEQUEL for short, until they realised that the name "SEQUEL" .was someone else's property so they dropped the English to get Structured Query Language and used the obvious abbreviation, SQL.
For Ingres, Stonebreaker decided to do an implementation of Codd's Alpha query language definition rather than IBM System R's SQL, but of course he couldn't call it ALpha because in the context of query languages that was IBM's property, and the query language that Ingres originally supported was just called Query Language, or QUEL for short; later an SQL implementation was added to Ingres, and Postgres's query language, PostgresSQL, has features from both QUEL and SQL. SDL's Ellison, on the other hand, reckoned from the start that trying to imitate IBM was a good bet so he used the System R language SQL for Oracle, and kept that name as they changed the company name first to RSI and then to Oracle to match their DBMS's name.
Tom