SQL was adopted as a standard by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in 1986 as SQL-86[20] and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in 1987. The original SQL standard declared that the official pronunciation for SQL is "es queue el".[1] Many English-speaking database professionals still use the nonstandard[21] pronunciation /ˈsiːkwəl/ (like the word "sequel"). SEQUEL was an earlier IBM database language, a predecessor to the SQL language.[22]
Until 1996, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) data management standards program certified SQL DBMS compliance with the SQL standard. Vendors now self-certify the compliance of their products.[23]
