If I were designing a oil refinery, I wouldn’t expect that materials from different vendors would not comply with published standards in subtle yet important ways. Pipework, valves and other components from one supplier would come with flanges and wall thicknesses to ANSI standards, as would the same parts from any other supplier. Interoperability and system safety is therefore assured.
Why then are the common databases so choosy about which parts of the standards they adhere to, and why have no 100% standards-compliant systems come to the fore? Are the standards ‘broken’, lacking in scope or too difficult to design for?
Taking this to conclusion; what is the point of ANSI (or ISO) defining standards for SQL?
Edit: List of implementation differences between common databases
In the software industry you have some standards that are really standards, i.e., products that don’t comply with them just don’t work. File specifications fall into that category. But then you also have ‘standards’ that are more like guidelines: they may defined as standards with point-by-point definitions, but routinely implemented only partially or with significant differences. Web development is full of such ‘standards’, like HTML, CSS and ‘ECMAScript’ where different vendors (i.e. web browsers) implement the standards differently.
The variation causes headaches, but the standardization still provides benefits. Imagine if there were no HTML standard at all and each browser used its own markup language. Likewise, imagine if there were no SQL standard and each database vendor used its own completely proprietary querying language. There would be much more vendor lock-in, and developers would have a much harder time working with more than one product.
So, no, ANSI SQL doesn’t serve the same purpose as ANSI standards do in other industries. But it does serve a useful purpose nonetheless.