How to Use This Book
SQL in a Nutshell, Third Edition, is primarily a command reference. As a consequence, you’ll probably use it to look up a variety of SQL commands and functions. However, with documentation for the ANSI standard itself plus four database platforms, the description for each command has the potential to get very large.
In order to reduce the verbiage describing each command, we compare each platform’s implementation to the SQL3 standard. If the platform supports a clause described in the SQL3 discussion, we won’t repeat that clause again.
Generic and transportable examples are provided within the body of each SQL3 command description. Since the SQL3 standard is ahead of most database platforms, examples aren’t provided for elements of the SQL3 commands that are not supported by any platform discussed in this book. In addition, more examples are provided for each database platform that highlight unique extensions and enhancements, of which there are many.
We recognize that our approach may necessitate jumping from a description of a platform’s implementation of a command back to the corresponding SQL3 command description. However, we felt that this was better than packing the book with hundreds of pages of redundant content.