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DAL started as a 3rd party product, '''CL/1''' (''Connectivity Language One''), from a small vendor, Network Innovations. Apple purchased the company in 1988, about the 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 a alternating level of support in which Apple would present the product and then ignore it. DAL's release was also coincident with Apple's fall from grace in the business world, and not coincidentially with [[Microsoft]]'s ODBC efforts. It appears to have seen little use, and eventually Apple sold it to tiny Independence Technologies in 1994, during a sell-off of a number of "high-end" packages such as their [[X.400]] server and an [[Systems Network Architecture|SNA]] client. In 1995 [[BEA Systems]] bought the company, and in turn sold it to [[Uniprise]] in late 1996. During this period it was basically a dead product.
DAL was essentially a cut-down version of SQL, supporting only the most basic functionality, but adding clean syntax for cursor operations, logic, and loops -- at that time no real standards existed for this side of SQL programming. When sent a command the 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, unlike most similar tools, requiring a fairly expensive "adaptor" program of dubious performance. This bit of architechture made DAL considerably less appealing than later systems like [[ODBC]], where the translation normally takes place on the client side and is typically "free".
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