Chapter 2 : Traditional RDBMS Systems Introduced by Michael Stonebraker

The System R project started under the direction of Frank King at IBM Research probably around 1972. By then Ted Codd’s pioneering paper was 18 months old, and it was obvious to a lot of people that one should build a prototype to test out his ideas. Unfortunately, Ted was not a permitted to lead this effort, and he went off to consider natural language interfaces to DBMSs. System R quickly decided to implement SQL, which morphed from a clean block structured language in 1972 [2] to a much more complex structure described in the paper here [1]. See [4] for a commentary on the design of the SQL language, written a decade later.