Re: it lives!
"Isn't SQL just COBOL for databases?"
Sort of; [original] SQL is RDBMS for Cobol programmers.
SQL is a relative late-comer to the RDBMS field. Before it were things like QUEL on Ingres, which I used from around 1981; my QUEL manual is dated 1977. The original SQL was rather lacking in functionality and did not implement the full relational algebra. The lack of functionality was because Cobol programmers generally did not understand things like data types and recursion. (CS courses at university were a very new thing at the time.)
With the passage of years, SQL has become more capable, but also more baroque. No two vendors implement the same syntax, and where they do overlap they frequently have different semantics. This lack of standardisation in both Cobol and SQL has paid my wages for a good may years ;-)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
