January 2008
Intermediate to advanced
384 pages
8h 1m
English
Content preview from Joe Celko's Thinking in Sets: Auxiliary, Temporal, and Virtual Tables in SQL
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Chapter 18. Procedural and Data-Driven Solutions
WE USED TO joke that SQL stands for “Scarcely Qualifies as a Language” because it lacks input and output formatting as well as special functions that other languages have to do particular jobs. What is forgotten is that SQL is a data management language, and it was never meant to do certain jobs.
Statistical and mathematical packages can handle floating-point rounding errors and provide libraries of complex functions. String and document base languages can search and manipulate character data far faster and easier than SQL. The only data structure in SQL is a multiset, so you cannot easily do operations that involve arrays.
This does not mean that you cannot do some of these things in SQL; but ...
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