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The DUAL table is a special one-row, one-column table present by default in Oracle and other database installations. In Oracle, the table has a single VARCHAR2(1) column called DUMMY that has a value of 'X'. It is suitable for use in selecting a pseudo column such as SYSDATE or USER.
Sometimes databases also support alternative syntax for this; for example, MySQL allows omitting the DEFAULT keyword, and T-SQL can use DEFAULT VALUES instead of VALUES(DEFAULT). The DEFAULT keyword can also be used in normal insertion to explicitly fill a column using that column's default value:
Although not in standard, most DBMS allows using a select clause without a table by pretending that an imaginary table with one row is used. This is mainly used to perform calculations where a table is not needed. The SELECT clause specifies a list of properties (columns) by name, or the wildcard character (“*”) to mean “all properties”.
It is often useful or necessary to know what identity value was generated by an INSERT command. Microsoft SQL Server provides several functions to do this: @@IDENTITY provides the last value generated on the current connection in the current scope, while IDENT_CURRENT(tablename) provides the last value generated, regardless of the connection or scope it was created on.
The following example of a SELECT query returns a list of expensive books. The query retrieves all rows from the Book table in which the price column contains a value greater than 100.00. The result is sorted in ascending order by title. The asterisk (*) in the select list indicates that all columns of the Book table should be included in the ...
Additionally there is a single-row version, UPDATE OR INSERT INTO tablename (columns) VALUES (values) [MATCHING (columns)], but the latter does not give you the option to take different actions on insert versus update (e.g. setting a new sequence value only for new rows, not for existing ones.)
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 the context of SQL, data definition or data description language (DDL) is a syntax for creating and modifying database objects such as tables, indices, and users. DDL statements are similar to a computer programming language for defining data structures, especially database schemas. Common examples of DDL statements include CREATE, ALTER ...