SQL in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

What’s New in SQL2006

The ANSI standards body that regulates SQL issued a new standard in 2006, in which the important major improvements of SQL3 were retained and augmented. The ANSI SQL2006 release was evolutionary over the SQL3 release, but it did not include any significant changes to the SQL3 commands and functions that were described in the second edition of this book. Instead, SQL2006 described an entirely new functional area of behavior for the SQL standard. Briefly, SQL2006 describes how SQL and XML (the eXtensible Markup Language) interact. For example, the SQL2006 standard describes how to import and store XML data in a SQL database, manipulate that data, and then publish the data both in native XML form and as conventional SQL data wrapped in XML form. The SQL2006 standard provides a means of integrating SQL application code with XQuery, the XML Query Language standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Because XML and XQuery are disciplines in their own right, they are considered beyond the scope of this book and are not covered here.