I think there's a case for disputing the official pronunciation because it's based off an "official" pronunciation of SQL. I've heard it ess-queue-elle and sequel, but personally side with sequel. It was originally called “Structured English Query Language”, abbreviated and pronounced "SEQUEL"; later shortened to "SQL" but same pronunciation. So I figure sequel-ite is a perfectly legitimate pronunciation.
That's how I do it. I understand the etymological reasons for "S-Q-L-ite", but SQLite is just too ubiquitous in my everyday work for me to speak 4 syllables when referring to it.
PostgreSQL is the fun one out because they officially say it is Postgres-Q-L.
The "it's always S-Q-L and never `sequel`" is IBM's fault and an early trademark infringement issue in computing. (IBM was told it couldn't call it "SEQUEL" by an aircraft company.)
For anyone curious about the trademark infringement, I hunted down the excerpt from the book that Wikipedia uses as a source (a book called Databases Demystified) and this is what it says in the book:
>> The forerunner of SQL, which was called SEQUEL (for Structured English Query Language), first emerged in the specifications for System R, IBM’s experimental relational database, in the late 1970s. However, two other products, with various names for their query language, beat IBM to the marketplace with the first commercial relational database products: Relational Software’s Oracle and Relational Technology’s Ingres. IBM released SQL/DS in 1982, with the query language name shortened to “SQL” after IBM discovered that “SEQUEL” was a trademark of the Hawker-Siddeley Aircraft Company. When IBM released its next generation RDBMS, called DB2, the SQL acronym remained. To this day, you will hear the name pronounced as an acronym (S-Q-L) and as a word (see-quel), and both are considered correct pronunciations.
I was hoping for a bit more interesting or detailed story.
I've heard that, but assumed it came from splitting up the name as "Postgre"+"SQL"; if you leave off the SQL part you get a word ending in E, and "postgreh" can't be right, can it? :)
Which is why I've also heard developers that either assumed the 'g' was silent or a transposition problem and you get "poster SQL", "postreg SQL", or worst of all "posgret SQL".
Somewhere, I believe in an HN comment, I saw a Postgres developer say that one of the biggest regrets of the project naming was capitalizing that "shared S".
The norm is to pronounce it by how likely you think you might get yelled at for trademark infringement by a holding company of the assets of an old aircraft company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawker_Siddeley
The name confusion is all IBM's fault.
> Chamberlin and Boyce's first attempt of a relational database language was Square, but it was difficult to use due to subscript notation. After moving to the San Jose Research Laboratory in 1973, they began work on SEQUEL. The acronym SEQUEL was later changed to SQL because "SEQUEL" was a trademark of the UK-based Hawker Siddeley Dynamics Engineering Limited company.
I looked it up, you're right, it is officially my-ess-que-ell. This leads to another question, how do you pronounce "NoSQL"? I couldn't find a convincing answer on the web. I used to say "sequel" for everything SQL related but clearly I was wrong.
