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Intergalactic dataspeak: SQL standard, Open SQL, ODBC, DRDA

Pat Selinger: Jim, I have your name next to Sybase, Informix, DEC, Teradata, Ingres, Britton-Lee, and Microsoft.

Jim Gray: Gee, what to say? I'm not going to say anything about most of them. I think actually what I'd like to do is talk about the SQL standard ...

various: No.Jim Gray: I'll do it anyway! Here is the original SQL manual (from System R). Just about 40 pages in Courier 10 font with lots of error numbers and lots of white space. It was real simple. Relational was hot, so ANSI started up a Relational Database Task force to define a standard. There was a DBTG task force that had a CODASYL network data model, and they were trying to standardize the network data model, and Don Chamberlin talked about how much fun it was to study the network data model. There were these things called currency indicators, and people loved them. You would do a query and it would set a currency indicator, and then you could fetch the thing that was pointed to by one of these currency indicators. In SQL terms, for every table there was a cursor. You could say the magic word, and it would change the cursor for that table. It would also change the global cursor. Have I got it sort of right?

Don Chamberlin: Yes.

Jim Gray: But you couldn't have two cursors on a table. So if you wanted to join a table to itself, then you'd have to remember where you were, and then go get the other record. So the Database Task Group basically was in big trouble; nobody really wanted to standardize this thing. So it was a standard that was this zombie; it was wandering around; I guess it got standardized maybe in 1990 or something like that? About the same time the first SQL standard came out, there was sort of this quid pro quo that we'll standardize DBTG and relational at the same time. But there was this relational task group that was wondering around, and they were getting in deeper, and deeper, and deeper water; lots of deep water, right? They'd done their own database language. At a certain point, Phil Shaw showed up at one of these meetings and said, "You know, you could do this," and he handed them something that was approximately this [holds up IBM's early SQL manual]. This is again ten-point type, single-spaced now, instead of double-spaced. Still a lot of white paper. These people, who were in hopeless deep water, said, "You're right; we could do this, and this is the only way we're going to make progress," because they were not making progress in any other way. So they glommed on to the ... and I think this was the design document that Don was chairman of this committee in IBM that was sort of the ... you were the Pope of SQL, or something like that? Have I got it twisted?

Don Chamberlin: Bob Engles had a lot to do with this[75]. I believe that most of the words in that book were written by Bob Engles. And what Bob Engles did was to study System R and write a formal specification for exactly what it did, warts and all. So there were all sorts of peculiar rules that were non-orthogonal: you couldn't do a GROUP BY if you also did a UNION; things like that. And there's no special reason for any of those things, except somebody didn't have time to build them or something like that. [laughter] So Bob Engles studied System R, and he's very meticulous and very precise, and he wrote down exactly what it did in a very formal sort of way. I think that's the document that you're holding right there. And then the standards committee kind of blessed it and they said, "This will be our standard."

Jim Gray: Only way we can make progress.

Don Chamberlin: They kept all the warts, too. They didn't try to clean any of it up.

Jim Gray: Right. No discussion of how to spell NULL. Chamberlin came back from an IBM Santa Teresa meeting one day, and said, "We spent the entire day deciding how we should spell NULL. Should it be ABSENT or NOT KNOWN or NULL or ?" The ANSI SQL guys did not mess around like the Santa Teresa guys. They took this, and this is essentially SQL 1 [holding document] - the standard. And this is SQL '86, is that right? ANSI - the Americans proposed this standard, but the Americans are just part of the international organization. The international organization said, "We'll make you a deal: we'll swallow this piece of junk if you'll swallow our referential integrity design" (foreign keys). And so there was going to be an appendix that came later, and the international standards body (ISO) would swallow this [SQL 1] if they would get to write the foreign key design. And so they wrote the foreign key design, which was basically SQL '89, so there's an addendum. Am I getting this right? Straighten me out if I've gotten it wrong.

So we're up to 1989; we've got something like this [demonstrates], and an addendum which was pretty short.

C. Mohan: He's eager to get to the next part. [laughter]

Jim Gray: And in fact, here is the whole enchilada [demonstrates]. And then we get to SQL 2, and here is SQL 2 [demonstrates], and it's a lot bigger. Actually, I don't have SQL 2 very easily; I apologize. But it's on this scale, OK? And what it has, is data definition; it has constraints; it has time; it has ... what are some of the good things?

Bruce Lindsay: Outer join.

Jim Gray: Outer joins. Sort of more complete. But it's very big; it's order five hundred pages.

Bruce Lindsay: It comes in three languages, too.

Tom Price: Did any of the referential integrity make it into SQL 1?

Jim Gray: Well, it was SQL 1.1.

Tom Price: And is it close to what DB2 implemented, or is it different?

Jim Gray: It's Chris Date's design, is the way I think of it. You know, they have cascading, and RESTRICT, and ...

So now the SQL committee has a life of its own, and it has SQL 3. Now this is the current enchilada that is SQL 3 [demonstrates a three-volume set of books]. And this, you have to appreciate, is nine-point type, and it is very, very dense, and it's just full of stuff. I think it's fair to say that most of us don't understand what's in there. I think Don Chamberlin maybe has spent a lot of ... he understands pages of it, I'm sure. And they're now trying to take SQL 3, and break it into two parts: SQL 3 and SQL 4. SQL 3 is probably going to get approved somewhere in 1997? And SQL 4's up into the next millennium, which I really think is a nice way of describing where it is.

Something else that happened is ODBC[76]; I'm coming to the Microsoft part. Something else that happened is that while we - Don Slutz and I, and a fellow named Rao Yendluri - were at Tandem, we said, "We really have a serious problem. We've got this database engine; this thing that stores bytes. It remembers things. But getting stuff into this computer and getting stuff out of it is virtually impossible. We've got no tools; we need to get tools. We can't build tools; we don't build tools. We want everybody to build tools that go to our system. How are we going to get everybody to build tools that go to our system? Well, we need to have a standard way for people to get to our system, just like getting to Oracle or getting to Sybase. So Plan A: we'll pretend to be Oracle. Everybody's going to build tools to go to Oracle. But that's kind of embarrassing, because that sort of puts us at Oracle's mercy. We have to masquerade as Oracle, and they can do things to shaft us, and so on. Plus, their externals aren't public. Sybase in fact has something called Tabular Data Stream, and we could masquerade as Sybase, and be a system that eats Tabular Data Stream and spits out Tabular Data Stream." So we thought about that and said, "What the world really needs is a client/server standard," because the tools vendors want to have a standard that they can program against, and know that their tool will work with anything. So the tools guys want to be able to go to every database server, and the server guys want every tool to come to them. So we said, "What we need is an intergalactic dataspeak." An Esperanto that would go on the wire, that would allow everybody to talk to everybody. I believe at the same time, in this period, IBM folks had exactly the same problem. They said, "We've got great servers, no tools; we need intergalactic dataspeak." So Slutz and Rao Yendluri and I wrote a white paper called "Open SQL". We said, "What the world needs is Open SQL, which is a wire protocol: how to talk SQL across the wire; how to talk tables back." We talked this up, and we went to the Sybase guys, and the Sybase guys loved to talk to us. Every time we talked to them, a press release would come out, about how Sybase and Tandem were working together on this problem. No code came out, just Sybase press releases. And every time we met, they said, "If you give us a hundred thousand dollars, we'll give you some code." But it was really very strange to work with them.

Don Slutz: They said it had to be TDS[77], too.

Jim Gray: Right. And, "Incidentally, whatever it is, it's ours; we'll just standardize what we've got. We'll minimize the effort we have to put in." So at a certain point, we realized we were being had by Sybase; we were pretty slow. All of a sudden, the skies darkened with executives from Digital Equipment Corporation. A cloud of DEC vice-presidents appeared on our doorstep at Tandem. They had gone through the same thought process, and said, "Rats, we need Open SQL." So they said, "Everybody has this problem; we're going to publicize it," and they formed the SQL Access Group. Informix was a founding member. We put off founding the SQL Access Group for, I think about three months, while IBM decided whether they wanted to join or to compete with the SQL Access Group (they had a plan called DRDA[78]). In the end I think they said, "Oracle, Informix, Tandem, all these guys: they'll never make any progress." I'm putting words in their mouths, but I think they said, "We'll make a lot more progress ourselves," and in fact they made pretty good progress. They came up with something called DRDA, which was a competitor to what the SQL Access Group did. So the SQL Access Group ground and ground and ground, and produced something called a call-level interface, and tried to build on top of some international standards, and the net that came out of this is something that is called ODBC[79], which is sort of an implementation of this. It is the standard way for clients to talk to servers. So you send me some SQL; what it means is defined by those multi-volume books we just saw. And so this is sort of how you make SQL requests, and how you send stuff back. And the scary thing is that a lot of people are learning how to write this stuff. Learning to program in this thing is a real undertaking; I kind of worry. But the good news is that the only people who have to learn to program in that way are the people who write all the tools. So virtually all the tools vendors are making ODBC drivers, which is to say end-users draw stuff on the screen and you make circles and arrows and say things that are pretty visual. The tools translate the GUI into SQL statements, and they use that call library to ship requests down the wire to a server. The server does its thing; sends tables back, and the tables do stuff on the screen. ODBC is beginning to have stored procedures and various other things.Bruce Lindsay: I'm really confused because ODBC is not a server protocol.

Jim Gray: Right, it's an API.

Don Slutz: There's no DRDA involved.

Bruce Lindsay: At the beginning you said you needed a standard way to put things on the network that will get to the server, and you don't care which server it's going to; it's on the network and it works. And ODBC is not that protocol.

Jim Gray: The tools vendors can write against this interface, and the tools vendors don't have to worry. Somehow, magically, bytes will get shipped down; bytes will get shipped back. And all the tools vendors run, of course, on ODBC platforms.

Tom Price: Well, there's ODBC drivers for things other than Microsoft.

Jim Gray: Right. The dual of what's happening is that one of the things in ODBC is that you can ask the guy at the other end, "Who are you?" Good answers to come back are, "I'm Oracle," or "I'm Sybase," or "I'm Microsoft SQL Server." The tools vendors negotiate and, if it's Microsoft SQL server, they do things special, and there is a transport that goes to Microsoft SQL Server. There's another transport that goes to Oracle; there's another transport that goes to Sybase. And Microsoft SQL Server and Sybase are very similar. So we're beginning to get intergalactic dataspeak. This hasn't solved Tandem's problem; Tandem ends up now having to masquerade as one of those three characters. At least it's solved the tool vendors' problems, which is that they have a standard programming interface. You're right, and in fact maybe we should now tell the DRDA story?

Pat Selinger: Go ahead.

Tom Price: IBM doesn't support ODBC yet, do they?

Jim Gray: Well they do in the UNIX world. The RS/6000 world supports ODBC. I don't know if there's an ODBC driver in the MVS world. I think there is in the AS/400 world.

Pat Selinger: Sure there is.

Don Slutz: In the SQL Access Group, IBM never joined, but ??? came, and they had him send Frank Pellow, who's IBM Toronto, so he was always there.

Tom Price: And if you have Sybase or Oracle, do they provide drivers, or do you have to get them from third parties?

Jim Gray: When ODBC first started shipping from Microsoft, they put in drivers for Oracle and for Microsoft SQL Server, which is to say Sybase, and a few others, and they began to get a lot of push-back from customers about the versions and so on. So I think at this point you actually have to get the driver from the provider; that Microsoft doesn't ship them, but you can download them.

Pat Selinger: IBM provides versions for themselves, and there're companies likes Q+E that have them.

Shel Finkelstein: The SQL standard decides how ... the foundation part of the standard now has these things called parts, one of which is Call-Level Interface, which is awfully close to ODBC. So it's not just that ODBC is a Microsoft thing; ODBC is part of a standard.

Jim Gray: And it's actually in the status of draft international standard, likely to get approved this year.

Shel Finkelstein: And there's also persistent stored modules. There's this new part proposed for temporal, plus there's a separate standard that's being worked out for multimedia. So what Jim has over there is just a small part of all the wonderful things that are going on. I got to go to Oklahoma City one week after the bombing for a SQL Standard meeting ???

Jim Gray: This is the SQL Reunion, and I think probably one of the important things to mention is how it's turned into intergalactic dataspeak. It's how clients talk to servers if they want to send structured data around. There is another intergalactic dataspeak called IDL, which is for remote procedure call, and a third one called HTTP, which in fact is being used for the Web and Mosaic, and it looks like HTTP is going to win in the end. The surprise for the future is HTTP wins.

So DRDA[80] is the approach that IBM took, rather than going with the SQL Access Group. It is much more concerned about what the on-the-wire protocol is. So it's what's called a formats-and-protocol. The message format's on the wire. What you say [gestures?] and the protocol: I say this, you say this. So we abbreviate that formats-and-protocols, or FAP. In fact, ODBC has no FAP; it's a procedure call, and then what happens underneath is a mystery, magic. In fact, what happens underneath is a driver from one or another vendor. This is a terrible situation unless there is only one kind of client, and only one version of each server, because then you just get the particular thing; otherwise you end up with an N-squared problem. One of the surprises to me, and I think to many people, is that the number of kinds of clients has dropped off, mostly because of the success of Windows. At any rate, DRDA is an IBM standard, and it's supported by DB2 and supported by the IBM products and ...

Pat Selinger: And twenty other vendors.

Jim Gray: And twenty other vendors, that's right.

Roger Miller: And X/Open.

Bruce Lindsay: DRDA fits underneath ODBC. You could use it for the ODBC stack.

Jim Gray: Could be. It's interesting; my impression is that the twenty vendors all have been paid to support it. I talked to the people at Informix, and they said, "Yes, we support it because IBM paid us to support it."

Pat Selinger: I don't believe that's the case. That is not the case as far as I know.

C. Mohan: No.

Roger Miller: I'm pretty sure that we did not pay.

Jim Gray: OK.

Roger Miller: We made it as easy as possible. We gave classes in attractive places and provided consulting. We certainly worked hard to get vendors to use DRDA.

Jim Gray: But they had to write the code.

Roger Miller: We had a nominal license, a few thousand dollars, less than the class would have cost, to license some pieces of the code. But we worked to make DRDA easy to implement and probably twisted some arms, but I don't think we paid anybody.

Jim Gray: So do you think it's going to be successful? Is it going to be the intergalactic dataspeak? Is it going to be the FAP do you think?

Pat Selinger: Who knows? It's certainly gaining some popularity among people who are performance conscious.

Bruce Lindsay: That's the interesting thing about ODBC; it seems to have ignored the performance issues. It's a strictly dynamic interface; there's no way they're running static SQL through ODBC.

Jim Gray: Actually, it has stored procedures, so ...Bruce Lindsay: Well, stored procedures and bound procedures are not quite the same thing, but close enough.

Jim Gray: They're better. [laughter]

[75] Bob Engles died June 22, 1995. Roger Miller notes: "Bob was the authority on SQL standards; he was the author of the original "SQL Control Document," which provided the foundation for the SQL ANSI/ISO Standards. He was the DB2 representative to the SQL Language Council since its inception, authoring many papers and articles, and providing consultations to the world-wide SQL community. He was the designer for many DB2 features, including referential integrity, code pages and character sets support, date time data support as well as the latest SQL '92 work. Throughout his career at IBM, and even recently as his illness progressed, he was an inspiration to many of us with his commitment to DB2. He was one of the key contributors to DB2's success and we will miss him."

[76] ODBC stands for Open Database Connectivity.

[77] TDS stands for Tabular Data Stream.

[78] DRDA stands for Distributed Relational Database Architecture.

[79] Microsoft Corporation. ODBC 2.0 Programmer's Reference and SDK Guide. Microsoft Press (1994).

[80] IBM Corporation. Distributed Relational Database Architecture Reference, SC26-4651.


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