Coding 101: How Do You Say SQL and What Is Its Role?

This week's discussion series is dedicated to helping beginners on their coding journey by addressing common doubts and misconceptions. We will delve into fundamental concepts, explore essential tools, and shed light on industry practices, providing clarity and guidance to those who are new to coding. If you're an experienced developer, your valuable insights, explanations, and best practices are highly encouraged and appreciated to support and mentor aspiring coders!

How do you pronounce "SQL," and what exactly does it do in the world of databases? Share your pronunciation preferences, explore its significance in managing data, and discuss your experiences working with SQL.

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Comments

[Fabian Holzer]

I think most peoples preferrences are shaped by the RDBMS they are using mainly.

MS SQLServer is to my knowlegde pronounced Sequel-Server. I think the ISO standard says that the pronunciation should be by the letters ES-QUE-EL, and MySQL has in its docs:

"The official way to pronounce “MySQL” is “My Ess Que Ell” (not “my sequel”), but we do not mind if you pronounce it as “my sequel” or in some other localized way."

dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/wh...

And of course:

Fabian Holzer • Apr 4

[Aaron Reese]

So Internet Lore says if we are talking about MSSQL it is Sequel. MS wanted To go one better than IBM with their DB2, but could not copyright Sequel as it is common English usage so they trademarked SQL and said it stood for Structured Query Language. When the syntax was standardised by ANSI, the acronym stood and so every other dialect should be ess-que-ell but for Microsoft it is tee-sequel. Personally I always call is Squirrel. 😁

[Randall]

I say "sequel" now. When I was in university we called it "es-queue-el". Then I had an interview and got asked about "sequel" and had no idea what they were talking about. Now it seems like that's the more common pronunciation (or maybe it always was).

[NLxDoDge]

In my school they always said the letters apart. So ess kew ell.

The first time I heard sequel I was thinking of a second part of a movie 🙃