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Alpha (programming language)

Database language proposed by Edgar F. Codd

Wikipedia contributorsAdapted for Fathomly · View authors
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Source updated October 31, 2025

The Alpha language was the original database language proposed by Edgar F. Codd, the inventor of the relational database approach. It was defined in Codd's 1971 paper "A Data Base Sublanguage Founded on the Relational Calculus". Alpha influenced the design of QUEL. It was eventually supplanted by SQL (which is however based on the relational algebra defined by Codd in "Relational Completeness of Data Base Sublanguages"), which IBM developed for its first commercial relational database product.

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This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Alpha (programming language)”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.

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Related topics

QUEL query languages

QUEL is a relational database query language, based on tuple relational calculus, with some similarities to SQL. It was created as a part of the Ingres DBMS effort at University of California, Berkeley, based on Codd's earlier suggested but not implemented Data Sub-Language ALPHA. QUEL was used for a short time in most products based on the freely available Ingres source code, most notably in an implementation called POSTQUEL supported by POSTGRES. Eugene Wong of Ingres was the creator of QUEL. As Oracle and IBM DB2 gained market share in the early 1980s, Ingres and other companies supporting QUEL moved to SQL. QUEL continues to be available as a part of the Ingres DBMS, although no QUEL-specific language enhancements have been added for many years.