### SQL Standards The first official standard for SQL was adopted by American National Standards Institute(ANSI) in 1986. This standard was slightly revised in 1989 and came to be known as "SQL-89" or "SQL1" standard. The next official standard was released in October 1992 with some major changes to the previously existing standard. The latest standard is referred to as SQL-2003 and contains several important enhancements to the previous versions. ### Emergence Of Different Dialects Even though SQL was accepted as a standard query language in the relational database environment as early as the late 70s, it could not stop the emergence of different SQL dialects because of various reasons. Some of those reasons are outlined below The original SQL standard in 1986 was not comprehensive enough and database vendors had to innovate in order to meet the growing customer demand for new features The standardization of syntax for new features was not proactive. Most of the advanced features were done after the vendors came up with their own syntax for the advanced features There was not much of an incentive for database vendors to go back and support a standard syntax as their customers were already getting used to the proprietary syntax The competitive pressures among various database vendors make them introduce new capabilities into their existing RDBMS technology. These capabilities further compounds the differences among the various existing databases Last but not the least, all vendors pay only lip service to standards and most of the time want to lock their customers into their product through proprietary extensions to standard

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