Ken North, writing in Dr. Dobb's Journal, gives a nice overview of the long and storied history of SQL. The piece helps one understand the wave of mergers among the big database vendors, and make sense of current trends in database and database-like software. And I'd like to offer my opinion about where SQL and database management systems are headed.

North looks into the claims that 'the database is dead' and finds that — yet again — reports of its death were greatly exaggerated:Forrester Research recently estimated the total database market (licenses, support, consulting) would grow from $27 billion in 2009 to $32 billion by 2012. SQL technology is entrenched in many organizations and across millions of web sites. Perhaps that explains why, during the past decade, IBM, Oracle, Sun and SAP made billion-dollar investments in a …