Data Access Language for the Macintosh, or simply DAL, was a SQL-like language and application programming interface released by Apple Computer in 1990 to provide unified client/server access to database management systems. It was known for poor performance and high costs, something Apple did little to address over its short lifetime, before it was sold off in 1994. DAL is used as the native SQL dialect of the PrimeBase SQL server, as well as the now-defunct Butler SQL. History DAL started as a 3rd-party product, CL/1 (Connectivity Language One), from a small vendor, Network Innovations. Apple purchased the company in 1988, during a time that client/server databases were becoming a hot issue in the industry. They released their first version of the re-branded software in 1989, for MVS, and followed with other versions over the next year or so. DAL suffered from most Apple problems of the early 1990s, notably an alternating level of support in which Apple would aggressively promote the product and then ignore it. Throughout, the company struggled with promoting the system as a cross-platform standard, or as a Mac-only technology. DAL's release was also coincident with Apple's fall from grace in the business world, and not coincidentally with Microsoft's ODBC efforts. DAL appears to have seen little use, and eventually Apple sold it to Independence Technologies in 1994, during a sell-off of a number of "high-end" packages such as their X.400 server and an SNA client. Independence Technologies was a middleware vendor, better known as a major reseller of the Tuxedo product for Unix. In 1995 BEA Systems bought the company, and in turn sold it to UniPrise Systems in late 1996. No releases took place during this period. Description Like Oracle's PL/SQL or Microsoft's Transact-SQL, DAL is essentially an extended version of SQL supporting basic query functionality and adding clean syntax for cursor operations, logic, and loops. When sent a command, early versions of Apple's DAL interpreter broke down the statement and re-built it into subqueries for the underlying data sources. This translation took place on the server-side, just like PL/SQL and Transact-SQL, but required a fairly expensive "adaptor" program of often dubious performance. This adaptor made DAL considerably less appealing than later systems like ODBC, where the translation normally takes place on the client side and is typically included for free with the database engine. The downside to the ODBC approach is that, theoretically