SQL Bible, Second Edition

Introduction

This book is about Structured Query Language. Known familiarly as SQL, it is the standard language of relational databases and the lingua franca of the database world. It has been around for more than 20 years and shows no signs of aging. It undergoes frequent revisions where proprietary inventions frequently introduced by database vendors (roughly, every two to three years) are either adopted into the standard, or become obsolete as the database community moves on. The latest SQL standard was introduced in 2003, and is going to be updated again in 2008. Despite considerable progress made, there are still significant variations between particular implementations and the ANSI/ISO SQL standards. That makes it difficult to find an SQL book "that has it all." One author might be biased toward a particular vendor so that you might get a decent Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server book but not necessarily a good SQL one; a single explanation of all SQL ANSI/ISO standards book would serve the needs of RDBMS developers, but might be less useful to the practitioners of the trade. We believe that a combination of these two approaches stands a good chance at bridging the theory and the practice.

Note

The RDBMS world is divided between people who pronounce SQL as "ess-cue-ell" and those who pronounce it as "sequel." This book holds the former as the correct pronunciation, hence the usage "an SQL keyword" rather than "a SQL keyword."

A comparison of modern database vendors shows that Oracle, ...