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E. F. Codd mentioned nulls as a method of representing missing data in the relational model in a 1975 paper in the FDT Bulletin of ACM-SIGMOD.Codd's paper that is most commonly cited with the semantics of Null (as adopted in SQL) is his 1979 paper in the ACM Transactions on Database Systems, in which he also introduced his Relational Model/Tasmania, although much of the other proposals from ...
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.
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 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 ...
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.
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.
Mutation and Selection. In relational algebra, a selection (sometimes called a restriction in reference to E.F. Codd's 1970 paper [1] and not, contrary to a popular belief, to avoid confusion with SQL's use of SELECT, since Codd's article predates the existence of SQL) is a unary operation that denotes a subset of a relation.
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.