Summarize the SQL Language , SQL Standards and SQL Commands
02.06.2010 by admin - 0 CommentPosted in Oracle
Summarize the SQL Language
SQL is defined, developed, and controlled by international bodies. Oracle Corporation does not have to conform to the SQL standard but chooses to do so. The language itself can be thought as being very simple (there are only 16 commands), but in practice SQL coding can be phenomenally complicated. That is why a whole book is needed to cover the bare fundamentals.
SQL Standards
Structured Query Language (SQL) was first invented by an IBM research group in the ’70s, but in fact Oracle Corporation (then trading as Relational Software, Inc.) claims to have beaten IBM to market by a few weeks with the first commercial implementation: Oracle 2, released in 1979. Since then the language has evolved enormously and is no longer driven by any one organization. SQL is now an international standard. It is managed by committees from ISO and ANSI. ISO is the Organisation Internationale de Normalisation, based in Geneva; ANSI is the American National Standards Institute, based in Washington, DC. The two bodies cooperate, and their SQL standards are identical.
Earlier releases of the Oracle database used an implementation of SQL that had some significant deviations from the standard. This was not because Oracle was being deliberately different: it was usually because Oracle implemented features that were ahead of the standard, and when the standard caught up, it used different syntax. An example is the outer join (detailed in Chapter 8), which Oracle implemented long before standard SQL; when standard SQL introduced an outer join, Oracle added support for the new join syntax while retaining support for its own proprietary syntax. Oracle Corporation ensures future compliance by inserting personnel onto the various ISO and ANSI committees and is now assisting with driving the SQL standard forward.
SQL Commands
These are the 16 SQL commands, separated into commonly used groups:The Data Manipulation Language (DML) commands:
SELECT
INSERT
UPDATE
DELETE
MERGE
The Data Definition Language (DDL) commands:
CREATE
ALTER
DROP
RENAME
TRUNCATE
COMMENT
The Data Control Language (DCL) commands:
GRANT
REVOKE
The Transaction Control Language (TCL) commands:
COMMIT
ROLLBACK
SAVEPOINT
The first command, SELECT, is the main subject of Chapters 2 through 9. The remaining DML commands are covered in Chapter 10, along with the TCL commands. DDL is detailed in Chapters 11 and 12. DCL, which has to do with security, is only briefly mentioned: it falls more into the domain of the database administrator than the developers.
