Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
An identity column differs from a primary key in that its values are managed by the server and usually cannot be modified. In many cases an identity column is used as a primary key; however, this is not always the case. It is a common misconception that an identity column will enforce uniqueness; however, this is not the case. If you want to ...
A surrogate key is frequently a sequential number (e.g. a Sybase or SQL Server "identity column", a PostgreSQL or Informix serial, an Oracle or SQL Server SEQUENCE or a column defined with AUTO_INCREMENT in MySQL). Some databases provide UUID/GUID as a possible data type for surrogate keys (e.g. PostgreSQL UUID [3] or SQL Server ...
In the relational model of databases, a primary key is a designated attribute that can reliably identify and distinguish between each individual record in a table.The database creator can choose an existing unique attribute or combination of attributes from the table (a natural key) to act as its primary key, or create a new attribute containing a unique ID that exists solely for this purpose ...
two new column types: auto-generated values and identity-columns; the new MERGE statement; extensions to the CREATE TABLE statement, to allow "CREATE TABLE AS" and "CREATE TABLE LIKE" removal of the poorly implemented "BIT" and "BIT VARYING" data types; OLAP capabilities (initially added in SQL:1999) were extended with a window function. [2 ...
The PK is a not empty set of attributes (or columns). The same format applies to the foreign key (abbreviated FK) because each FK matches a preexistent PK. Each of attributes being part of a PK (or of a FK) must have data values (such as numbers, letters or typographic symbols) but not data marks (also known as NULL marks in SQL world).
For example, in Microsoft SQL Server, the key is retrieved via the SCOPE_IDENTITY() special function, while in SQLite the function is named last_insert_rowid(). Using a database-specific SELECT statement on a temporary table containing last inserted row(s). Db2 implements this feature in the following way:
Each column in an SQL table declares the type(s) that column may contain. ANSI SQL includes the following data types. [14] Character strings and national character strings. CHARACTER(n) (or CHAR(n)): fixed-width n-character string, padded with spaces as needed; CHARACTER VARYING(n) (or VARCHAR(n)): variable-width string with a maximum size of n ...
In relational databases, the information schema (information_schema) is an ANSI-standard set of read-only views that provide information about all of the tables, views, columns, and procedures in a database. [1] It can be used as a source of the information that some databases make available through non-standard commands, such as: