Data Analysis Using SQL and Excel, 2nd Edition

Appendix Equivalent Constructs Among Databases

Relational databases support SQL in the same way that English is the language of Great Britain, the United States, India, and Jamaica. Although there is much in common among the databases, each dialect has its own vocabulary and accents.

Throughout the book, the SQL examples have used Microsoft T-SQL as the dialect of choice. The purpose of this appendix is to show equivalent SQL constructs in different databases for many of the capabilities used throughout the chapters.

The six database engines, in alphabetical order, are:

• IBM DB2 version 9 and above
• MySQL version 5 and above
• Oracle version 9 and above
• Postgres version 9 and above
• SAS proc sql
• SQL Server version 2012 and above

The databases from IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle are commercial products, although functional versions can often be downloaded for free. MySQL and Postgres are free database engines, and Postgres syntax is used for many commercial products, such as Netezza, Vertica, Amazon Redshift, ParAccel, and more. SAS proc sql is the SQL engine within the SAS language (the most popular commercial statistical software). When using SAS, proc sql can be used in two different modes. In one, it communicates directly to a database, and supports the language of the database. In the other, it runs within SAS and uses SAS's particular constructs.

This appendix is provided as is, without any guarantees that the software has not changed for whatever reason.

This appendix is organized ...