In June 1970, a research paper was published by Dr. E.F. Codd called A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks. The Association of Computer Machinery (ACM) accepted Codd's data and technology model, which has become the standard of the RDBMS today. IBM Corporation had invented the language called Structured English Query Language (SEQUEL), where the word "English" was dropped to become SQL.

SQL has become the standard for the RDMS, which is used by databases such as Oracle, Sybase, and Microsoft's SQL Server.

Today, there are American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standards for SQL, and there are many variations of this technology. Among the mentioned manufacturers, there are also others available in the open source world, for example, an SQL query engine, such as Presto.

Presto is the distribution engine for SQL under open source, which is made to execute interactive analytic queries. Presto queries are run under databases from a variety of data source sizes—gigabytes to petabytes.

Companies such as Facebook and Dropbox use the Presto SQL engine for their queries and analytics in data warehouse and related applications.

SQL is made up of data manipulation and definition language built with tuple and algebra calculation in a relational format. This language has a variety of statements but most would recognize the INSERT, SELECT, UPDATE, and DELETE statements. These statements form a part of the database schema management process and aid the data and security accesses. SQL includes procedural elements as a part of its setup.