Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
An identifier may not be equal to a reserved keyword, unless it is a delimited identifier. Delimited identifiers means identifiers enclosed in double quotation marks. They can contain characters normally not supported in SQL identifiers, and they can be identical to a reserved word, e.g. a column named YEAR is specified as "YEAR".
The SQL EXCEPT operator takes the distinct rows of one query and returns the rows that do not appear in a second result set. For purposes of row elimination and duplicate removal, the EXCEPT operator does not distinguish between NULLs .
The SQL SELECT statement returns a result set of rows, from one or more tables. [1] [2] A SELECT statement retrieves zero or more rows from one or more database tables or database views. In most applications, SELECT is the most commonly used data manipulation language (DML) command.
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.
In addition to basic equality and inequality conditions, SQL allows for more complex conditional logic through constructs such as CASE, COALESCE, and NULLIF.The CASE expression, for example, enables SQL to perform conditional branching within queries, providing a mechanism to return different values based on evaluated conditions.
The SQL:1999 standard introduced a BOOLEAN data type as an optional feature (T031). When restricted by a NOT NULL constraint, a SQL BOOLEAN behaves like Booleans in other languages, which can store only TRUE and FALSE values. However, if it is nullable, which is the default like all other SQL data types, it can have the special null value also.
SQL was initially developed at IBM by Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce after learning about the relational model from Edgar F. Codd [12] in the early 1970s. [13] This version, initially called SEQUEL (Structured English Query Language), was designed to manipulate and retrieve data stored in IBM's original quasirelational database management system, System R, which a group at IBM San ...
The basic relational building block is the domain (somewhat similar, but not equal to, a data type). A tuple is a finite sequence of attributes, which are ordered pairs of domains and values. A relation is a set of (compatible) tuples. Although these relational concepts are mathematically defined, those definitions map loosely to traditional ...