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The syntax of the SQL programming language is defined and maintained by ISO/IEC SC 32 as part of ISO/IEC 9075.This standard is not freely available. Despite the existence of the standard, SQL code is not completely portable among different database systems without adjustments.
Since the calculus is a query language for relational databases we first have to define a relational database. 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 ...
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.
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 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 ...
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. This logic ...
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. As SQL is a declarative programming language, SELECT queries specify a result set, but do
It can be used as a source of the information that some databases make available through non-standard commands, such as: the SHOW command of MySQL; the DESCRIBE command of Oracle's SQL*Plus; the \d command in psql (PostgreSQL's default command-line program).