QUEL&#x27;s problem was not that it was for the elite but that Relational Technology (later named Ingres) did not have any sense on how to market and sell Ingres RDBMS and promote QUEL.  Oracle&#x27;s strength has always been marketing and sales and they started to take over the market quickly from Ingres in the first few years of commercial RDBMS.<p>Yes there were other players in the market at the time but in the very early days it really was Ingres versus Oracle.<p>For those of us that are older we know that Ingres was a result of Dr. Michael Stonebraker&#x27;s work at Berkeley. There was at the time a university project known as Ingres and a commercial product known as Ingres.  Yes postgres is what happened at Berkeley after Ingres.<p>I always loved QUEL and was downright pissed when it was ignored over the inferior SQL.