SQL in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

History of the SQL Standard

Because SQL dialects began to proliferate, the ANSI published its first SQL standard in 1986 to bring greater conformity among vendors, and a second, widely-adopted standard in 1989. The International Standards Organization (ISO) also approves the SQL standard. ANSI released updates in 1992, known as SQL92 and SQL2, and again in 1999, termed both SQL99 and SQL3. Now that the ANSI standard has advanced, we generally use the industry standard term SQL2003. Each time it revises the SQL standard, ANSI adds new features and incorporates new commands and capabilities into the language. For example, the SQL99 standard added a group of capabilities that handled object-oriented datatype extensions.