CODASYL

CODASYL stands for Conference on Data Systems Languages. It was established in 1959 by a coalition of industry and government groups to promote standardization in data processing and programming. The organization is best known for guiding the development of the COBOL programming language and for promoting a family of database and data description standards that shaped early database management systems.

CODASYL also promoted the CODASYL Data Model, a network database model in which databases were defined as record types connected by set types representing one-to-many relationships. Data descriptions and manipulation were specified through the Data Description Language (DDL) and Data Manipulation Language (DML), published by the CODASYL Data Base Task Group (DBTG).

During the 1960s and 1970s, network databases based on CODASYL conventions were widely used in business and government systems, with products such as IDMS and others implementing the model.

From the 1980s, relational databases and SQL supplanted CODASYL-style network databases in most new applications; CODASYL standards themselves gradually declined, though some products continued to support CODASYL concepts in legacy environments.