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Conjunctive queries also correspond to select-project-join queries in relational algebra (i.e., relational algebra queries that do not use the operations union or difference) and to select-from-where queries in SQL in which the where-condition uses exclusively conjunctions of atomic equality conditions, i.e. conditions constructed from column ...
Standard SQL uses the same operators as BASIC, while many databases allow != in addition to <> from the standard. SQL follows strict boolean algebra, i.e. doesn't use short-circuit evaluation, which is common to most languages below. E.g. PHP has it, but otherwise it has these same two operators defined as aliases, like many SQL databases.
SQL includes operators and functions for calculating values on stored values. SQL allows the use of expressions in the select list to project data, as in the following example, which returns a list of books that cost more than 100.00 with an additional sales_tax column containing a sales tax figure calculated at 6% of the price.
The relational algebra uses set union, set difference, and Cartesian product from set theory, and adds additional constraints to these operators to create new ones.. For set union and set difference, the two relations involved must be union-compatible—that is, the two relations must have the same set of attributes.
Booleans appear in SQL when a condition is needed, such as WHERE clause, in form of predicate which is produced by using operators such as comparison operators, IN operator, IS (NOT) NULL etc. However, apart from TRUE and FALSE, these operators can also yield a third state, called UNKNOWN, when comparison with NULL is made.
Basic SQL comparison operators always return Unknown when comparing anything with Null, so the SQL standard provides for two special Null-specific comparison predicates. The IS NULL and IS NOT NULL predicates (which use a postfix syntax) test whether data is, or is not, Null.
A WHERE clause in SQL specifies that a SQL Data Manipulation Language (DML) statement should only affect rows that meet specified criteria. The criteria are expressed in the form of predicates. WHERE clauses are not mandatory clauses of SQL DML statements, but can be used to limit the number of rows affected by a SQL DML statement or returned ...
Actual SQL implementations normally use other approaches, such as hash joins or sort-merge joins, since computing the Cartesian product is slower and would often require a prohibitively large amount of memory to store. SQL specifies two different syntactical ways to express joins: the "explicit join notation" and the "implicit join notation".