Maybe. Before Oracle (mid-80s) every company did write their own database code.

I think a lot of smaller companies would struggle if that was still a requirement, but if relational/SQL had not come along we’d have something else like it.

That's exactly my point, though. In the mid 80s there were a lot fewer companies producing software. Nowadays we have many more.

Indeed SQL was not the only local maxima we could have gone for, but the point is that having an easy to use database with a powerful query language did not reduce the number of jobs, but instead increased it. Instead of a few companies hiring a lot of developers, we have a lot of companies hiring a few. The latter will usually mean more jobs.

I think plummeting prices for hardware since the 1980s drove that, not relational databases.

If hardware was cheaper, but writing software required an army of developers to do it, the costs would still be too great. If you read carefully, my point isn't that SQL was the cause of the tech boom, but rather that SQL and other technologies that make developers more productive didn't really take jobs away, because the market for tech would be smaller if you needed too many developers to do anything.

>Before Oracle (mid-80s) every company did write their own database code.

Not really. There were a ton of ISVs competing with Oracle and pretty much every mainframe and minicomputer maker also had their own database products, many of them non-SQL.

Oracle was the first commercial RDBMS (1979), with an early version of SQL. At that time every mainframe and minicomputer company offered one or more “databases,” often little more than file managers with a library of utilities. ISAM was a popular model but that describes a lot of data management systems, not a product or standard.

All commercial databases pre-Oracle were non-SQL. Watching that history get rediscovered and pushed as an improvement by people mostly too young to know better — so-called NoSQL databases — brings to mind Alan Kay’s quip about the software industry constantly reinventing the flat tire.

The hash-based Pick OS/database came out before Oracle but only ran on a few computers from Microdata and later Pr1me and Honeywell. Pick-based systems remained popular into the early 2000s in some sectors. A friend of mine still works on one, for a state government agency.

You could construct a database management system from the ISAM-based libraries for COBOL or Fortran, but I wouldn’t call those database management systems comparable to Oracle. Mostly they didn’t have a query language per se — you had to write code to get anything in or out. And they ran as part of the application process, not as a separate server dedicated to running the database engine.

I was thinking Db2 might have been a little earlier but you're right. And it's fair that the earlier databases definitely lacked elements of what we'd consider a database management system today even if they handled a lot of the low-level database heavy lifting for companies.