The SQL Standard
To bring greater conformity among vendors, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) published its first SQL standard in 1986 and a second widely adopted standard in 1989. ANSI released updates in 1992, known as SQL92 and SQL2, and again in 1999, termed both SQL99 and SQL3. Each time, ANSI added new features and incorporated new commands and capabilities into the language. Unique to the SQL99 standard is a group of capabilities that handle object-oriented datatype extensions. The International Standards Organization (ISO) has also approved SQL99. An important change from SQL92 is that SQL99 expands on SQL92’s levels of conformance.
Levels of Conformance
SQL92 first introduced levels of conformance by defining three categories: Entry, Intermediate, and Full. Vendors had to achieve Entry-level conformance to claim ANSI SQL compliance. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) later added the Transitional level between the Entry and Intermediate levels. So, NIST’s levels of conformance were Entry, Transitional, Intermediate, and Full, while ANSI’s were only Entry, Intermediate, and Full. Each higher level of the standard was a superset of the subordinate level, meaning that each higher level of the standard included all the features of the lower level of conformance.
SQL99 altered the base levels of conformance. Gone are the Entry, Intermediate, and Full levels of conformance. With SQL99, vendors must implement all the features of the ...
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