How This Book Is Organized
SQL in a Nutshell, Third Edition, is divided into four chapters and one appendix:
- Chapter 1
Discusses the relational database model, describes the current and previous SQL standards, and introduces the SQL implementations covered in this book.
- Chapter 2
Describes the fundamental concepts necessary for understanding relational databases and SQL commands.
- Chapter 3
Provides an alphabetical command reference to SQL statements. This chapter details the latest ANSI standard (SQL3) for each command, as well as the implementation of each command by MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server.
- Chapter 4
Provides an alphabetical reference of the ANSI SQL3 functions, describing vendor implementations of all SQL3 functions. In addition, this chapter includes coverage of all platform-specific functions that are unique to each implementation.
- Appendix A
Provides a table of keywords declared in SQL3 and by the different database platforms. You can use this table to look for words that you should not use for object or variable names.