Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties, 3rd Edition

25.1. Arrays via Named Columns

An array in other programming languages has a name and subscripts by which the array elements are referenced. The array elements are all of the same data type, and the subscripts are all sequential integers. Some languages start numbering at zero, some start numbering at one, and some let the user set the upper and lower bounds. For example, a Pascal array declaration would look like this:

foobar : ARRAY [1..5] OF INTEGER;

and would have integer elements foobar[1], foobar[2], foobar[3], foobar[4], and foobar[5]. The same structure is most often mapped into an SQL declaration as:

CREATE TABLE Foobar1 (element1 INTEGER NOT NULL, element2 INTEGER NOT NULL, element3 INTEGER NOT NULL, element4 INTEGER NOT NULL, element5 ...