SQL For Dummies

Introduction

Welcome to database development using SQL, the industry-standard database query language. Many database management system (DBMS) tools run on a variety of hardware platforms. The differences among the tools can be great, but all serious products have one thing in common: They support SQL data access and manipulation. If you know SQL, you can build relational databases and get useful information out of them.

About This Book

Relational database management systems are vital to many organizations. People often think that creating and maintaining these systems must be extremely complex activities — the domain of database gurus who possess enlightenment beyond that of mere mortals. This book sweeps away the database mystique. In this book, you

Get to the roots of databases.

Find out how a DBMS is structured.

Discover the major functional components of SQL.

Build a database.

Protect a database from harm.

Operate on database data.

Determine how to get the information you want out of a database.

The purpose of this book is to help you build relational databases and get valuable information out of them by using SQL. SQL is the international standard language used to create and maintain relational databases. This edition covers the latest version of the standard, SQL:2016.

This book doesn’t tell you how to design a database (I do that in Database Development For Dummies, also published by Wiley). Here I assume that you or somebody else has already created a valid design. I then illustrate how you implement that design by using SQL. If you suspect that you don’t have a good database design, then by all means fix your design before you try to build the database. The earlier you detect and correct problems in a development project, the cheaper the corrections will be.

Foolish Assumptions

If you need to store or retrieve data from a DBMS, you can do a much better job with a working knowledge of SQL. You don’t need to be a programmer to use SQL, and you don’t need to know programming languages, such as Java, C, or BASIC. SQL’s syntax is like that of English. If you are a programmer, you can incorporate SQL into your programs. SQL adds powerful data manipulation and retrieval capabilities to conventional languages. This book tells you what you need to know to use SQL’s rich assortment of tools and features inside your programs.

Icons Used in This Book

When something in this book is particularly valuable, we go out of our way to make sure that it stands out. We use these cool icons to mark text that (for one reason or another) really needs your attention. Here’s a quick preview of the ones waiting for you in this book and what they mean.

Tip Tips save you a lot of time and keep you out of trouble.

Remember Pay attention to the information marked by this icon — you may need it later.

Warning Heeding the advice that this icon points to can save you from major grief. Ignore it at your peril.

Technicalstuff This icon alerts you to the presence of technical details that are interesting but not absolutely essential to understanding the topic being discussed.

Beyond the Book

In addition to the content in this book, you’ll find some extra content available at the www.dummies.com website:

For the Cheat Sheet for this book, visitwww.dummies.com/ and search for SQL For Dummies 9E cheat sheet.

For updates to this book, if any, visit thewww.dummies.com store and search for SQL For Dummies 9E.

Where to Go from Here

Now for the fun part! Databases are the best tools ever invented for keeping track of the things you care about. After you understand databases and can use SQL to make them do your bidding, you wield tremendous power. Co-workers come to you when they need critical information. Managers seek your advice. Youngsters ask for your autograph. But most importantly, you know, at a very deep level, how your organization really works.

Part 1

Getting Started with SQL

IN THIS PART…

The essentials of relational databases

Basic SQL concepts

Fundamental database tools

Chapter 1

Relational Database Fundamentals

IN THIS CHAPTER

Bullet Organizing information

Bullet Defining database in digital terms

Bullet Deciphering DBMS

Bullet Looking at the evolution of database models

Bullet Defining relational database (can you relate?)

Bullet Considering the challenges of database design

SQL (pronounced ess-que-ell, not see’qwl, though database geeks still argue about that) is a language specifically designed with databases in mind. SQL enables people to create databases, add new data to them, maintain the data in them, and retrieve selected parts of the data. Developed in the 1970s at IBM, SQL has grown and advanced over the years to become the industry standard. It is governed by a formal standard maintained by the International Standards Organization (ISO).

Various kinds of databases exist, each adhering to a different model of how the data in the database is organized.

SQL was originally developed to operate on data in databases that follow the relational model. Recently, the international SQL standard has incorporated part of the object model, resulting in hybrid structures called object-relational databases. In this chapter, I discuss data storage, devote a section to how the relational model compares with other major models, and provide a look at the important features of relational databases.

Before I talk about SQL, however, I want to nail down what I mean by the term database. Its meaning has changed, just as computers have changed the way people record and maintain information.

Keeping Track of Things

Today people use computers to perform many tasks formerly done with other tools. Computers have replaced typewriters for creating and modifying documents. They’ve surpassed calculators as the best way to do math. They’ve also replaced millions of pieces of paper, file folders, and file cabinets as the principal storage medium for important information. Compared with those old tools, of course, computers do much more, much faster — and with greater accuracy. These increased benefits do come at a cost, however: Computer users no longer have direct physical access to their data.

When computers occasionally fail, office workers may wonder whether computerization really improved anything at all. In the old days, a manila file folder crashed only if you dropped it — then you merely knelt down, picked up the papers, and put them back in the folder. Barring earthquakes or other major disasters, file cabinets never went down, and they never gave you an error message. A hard-drive crash is another matter entirely: You can’t pick up lost bits and bytes. Mechanical, electrical, and human failures can make your data go away into the Great Beyond, never to return. Backing up your data frequently is one thing you can do to enhance your peace of mind. Another thing you can do is store your data in the cloud and let your cloud provider do the backing up.

Taking the necessary precautions to protect yourself from accidental data loss allows you to start cashing in on the greater speed and accuracy that computers provide.

If you’re storing important data, you have four main concerns:

Storing data must be quick and easy because you’re likely to do it often.

The storage medium must be reliable. You don’t want to come back later and find some (or all) of your data missing.

Data retrieval must be quick and easy, regardless of how many items you store.

You need an easy way to separate the exact information you want now from the tons of data that you don’t want right now.

State-of-the-art computer databases satisfy these four criteria. If you store more than a dozen or so data items, you probably want to store those items in a database.

What Is a Database?

The term database has fallen into loose use lately, losing much of its original meaning. To some people, a database is any collection of data items (phone books, laundry lists, parchment scrolls … whatever). Other people define the term more strictly.

In this book, I define a database as a self-describing collection of integrated records. And yes, that does imply computer technology, complete with programming languages such as SQL.

Remember A record is a representation of some physical or conceptual object. Say, for example, that you want to keep track of a business’s customers. You assign a record for each customer. Each record has multiple attributes, such as name, address, and telephone number. Individual names, addresses, and so on are the data.

A database consists of both data and metadata. Metadata is the data that describes the data’s structure within a database. If you know how your data is arranged, then you can retrieve it. Because the database contains a description of its own structure, it’s self-describing. The database is integrated because it includes not only data items but also the relationships among data items.

The database stores metadata in an area called the data dictionary, which describes the tables, columns, indexes, constraints, and other items that make up the database.

Because a flat-file system (described later in this chapter) has no metadata, applications written to work with flat files must contain the equivalent of the metadata as part of the application program.

Database Size and Complexity

Databases come in all sizes, from simple collections of a few records to mammoth systems holding millions of records. Most databases fall into one of three categories, which are based on the size of the database itself, the size of the equipment it runs on, and the size of the organization that is maintaining it:

A personal database is designed for use by a single person on a single computer. Such a database usually has a rather simple structure and a relatively small size.

A departmental or workgroup database is used by the members of a single department or workgroup within an organization. This type of database is generally larger than a personal database and is necessarily more complex; such a database must handle multiple users trying to access the same data at the same time.

An enterprise database can be huge. Enterprise databases may model the critical information flow of entire large organizations.

What Is a Database Management System?

Glad you asked. A database management system (DBMS) is a set of programs used to define, administer, and process databases and their associated applications. The database being managed is, in essence, a structure that you build to hold valuable data. A DBMS is the tool you use to build that structure and operate on the data contained within the database.

You can find many DBMS programs on the market today. Some run on large and powerful machines, and some on personal computers, notebooks, and tablets. Some even run on smartphones. A strong trend, however, is for such products to work on multiple platforms or on networks that contain different classes of machines. An even stronger trend is to store data in data centers or even to store it out in the cloud, which could be a public cloud run by a large company such as Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, via the Internet, or it could be a private cloud operated by the same organization that is storing the data on its own intranet.

These days, cloud is a buzzword that is bandied about incessantly in techie circles. Like the puffy white things up in the sky, it has indistinct edges and seems to float somewhere out there. In reality, it is a collection of computing resources that is accessible via a browser, either over the Internet or on a private intranet. The thing that distinguishes the computing resources in the cloud from similar computing resources in a physical data center is the fact that the resources are accessible via a browser rather than an application program that directly accesses those resources.

Remember A DBMS that runs on platforms of multiple classes, large and small, is called scalable.

Whatever the size of the computer that hosts the database — and regardless of whether the machine is connected to a network — the flow of information between database and user is always the same. Figure 1-1 shows that the user communicates with the database through the DBMS. The DBMS masks the physical details of the database storage so that the application need only concern itself with the logical characteristics of the data, not with how the data is stored.

FIGURE 1-1: A block diagram of a DBMS-based information system.

THE VALUE IS NOT IN THE DATA, BUT IN THE STRUCTURE

Years ago, some clever person calculated that if you reduce human beings to their components of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen atoms (plus traces of others), they would be worth only 97 cents. However droll this assessment, it’s misleading. People aren’t composed of mere isolated collections of atoms. Our atoms combine into enzymes, proteins, hormones, and many other substances that would cost millions of dollars per ounce on the pharmaceutical market. The precise structure of these combinations of atoms is what gives them greater value. By analogy, database structure makes possible the interpretation of seemingly meaningless data. The structure brings to the surface patterns, trends, and tendencies in the data. Unstructured data — like uncombined atoms — has little or no value.

Flat Files

Where structured data is concerned, the flat file is as simple as it gets. No, a flat file isn’t a folder that’s been squashed under a stack of books. Flat files are so called because they have minimal structure. If they were buildings, they’d barely stick up from the ground. A flat file is simply a collection of data records, one after another, in a specified format — the data, the whole data, and nothing but the data — in effect, a list. In computer terms, a flat file is simple. Because the file doesn’t store structural information (metadata), its overhead (stuff in the file that is not data but takes up storage space) is minimal.

Say that you want to keep track of the names and addresses of your company’s customers in a flat file system. The system may have a structure something like this:

Harold Percival  26262 S. Howards Mill Rd  Westminster  CA92683

Jerry Appel      32323 S. River Lane Rd    Santa Ana    CA92705

Adrian Hansen    232 Glenwood Court        Anaheim      CA92640

John Baker      2222 Lafayette St        Garden Grove CA92643

Michael Pens    77730 S. New Era Rd      Irvine      CA92715

Bob Michimoto    25252 S. Kelmsley Dr      Stanton      CA92610

Linda Smith      444 S.E. Seventh St      Costa Mesa  CA92635

Robert Funnell  2424 Sheri Court          Anaheim      CA92640

Bill Checkal    9595 Curry Dr            Stanton      CA92610

Jed Style        3535 Randall St          Santa Ana    CA92705

As you can see, the file contains nothing but data. Each field has a fixed length (the Name field, for example, is always exactly 15 characters long), and no structure separates one field from another. The person who created the database assigned field positions and lengths. Any program using this file must know how each field was assigned, because that information is not contained in the database itself.

Such low overhead means that operating on flat files can be very fast. On the minus side, however, application programs must include logic that manipulates the file's data at a very detailed level. The application must know exactly where and how the file stores its data. Thus, for small systems, flat files work fine. The larger a system is, however, the more cumbersome a flat-file system becomes.

Tip Using a database instead of a flat-file system eliminates duplication of effort. Although database files themselves may have more overhead, the applications can be more portable across various hardware platforms and operating systems. A database also makes writing application programs easier because the programmer doesn’t need to know the physical details of where and how the data is stored.

The reason databases eliminate duplication of effort is because the DBMS handles the data-manipulation details. Applications written to operate on flat files must include those details in the application code. If multiple applications all access the same flat-file data, these applications must all (redundantly) include that data-manipulation code. If you’re using a DBMS, however, you don’t need to include such code in the applications at all.

Clearly, if a flat-file-based application includes data-manipulation code that runs only on a particular operating system (OS), migrating the application to a different OS is a headache waiting to happen. You must change all the OS-specific code — and that’s just for openers. Migrating a similar DBMS-based application to another OS is much simpler — fewer complicated steps, fewer aspirin consumed.

Database Models

The first databases, back at the dawn of time (1950s), were structured according to a hierarchical model. They suffered from redundancy problems, and their structural inflexibility made database modification difficult. They were soon followed by databases that adhered to the network model, which strove to eliminate the main disadvantages of the hierarchical model. Network databases have minimal redundancy but pay for that advantage with structural complexity.

Some years later, Dr. E. F. Codd at IBM developed the relational model, which featured minimal redundancy and an easily understood structure. The SQL language was developed to operate on relational databases. Relational databases eventually consigned the hierarchical and network databases to the dustbin of history.

Technicalstuff A relatively new phenomenon is the emergence of the so-called NoSQL databases, which lack the structure of the relational databases and do not use the SQL language. I don’t cover NoSQL databases in this book. If this topic interests you, check out NoSQL For Dummies, by Adam Fowler (Wiley Publishing, Inc.).

Relational model

Dr. Codd first formulated the relational database model in 1970, and this model started appearing in products about a decade later. Ironically, IBM did not deliver the first relational DBMS. That distinction went to a small start-up company, which named its product Oracle.

Relational databases have almost completely replaced earlier database types. That’s largely because you can change the structure of a relational database without having to change or modify applications that were based on the old structures. Suppose, for example, that you add one or more new columns to a database table. You don’t need to change any previously written applications that process that table — unless, of course, you alter one or more of the columns that those applications use.

Warning Of course, if you remove a column that an existing application uses, you experience problems no matter what database model you follow. One of the quickest ways to make a database application crash is to ask it to retrieve a piece of data that your database doesn’t contain.

Components of a relational database

Relational databases gain their flexibility because their data resides in tables that are largely independent of each other. You can add, delete, or change data in a table without affecting the data in the other tables, provided that the affected table is not a parent of any of the other tables. (Parent-child table relationships are explained in Chapter 5, and no, they don’t involve discussing allowances over dinner.) In this section, I show what these tables consist of and how they relate to the other parts of a relational database.

Dealing with your relations

At holiday time, many of my relatives come to my house and sit down at my table. Databases have relations, too, but each of their relations has its own table. A relational database is made up of one or more relations.

Remember A relation is a two-dimensional array of rows and columns, containing single-valued entries and no duplicate rows. Each cell in the array can have only one value, and no two rows may be identical. If that’s a little hard to picture, here’s an example that will put you in the right ballpark… .

Most people are familiar with two-dimensional arrays of rows and columns, in the form of electronic spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel. A major-league baseball player’s offensive statistics, as listed on the back of a baseball card, are an example of such an array. On the baseball card are columns for year, team, games played, at-bats, hits, runs scored, runs batted in, doubles, triples, home runs, bases on balls, steals, and batting average. A row covers each year that the player has played in the Major Leagues. You can also store this data in a relation (a table), which has the same basic structure. Figure 1-2 shows a relational database table holding the offensive statistics for a single major-league player. In practice, such a table would hold the statistics for an entire team — or perhaps the whole league.

FIGURE 1-2: A table showing a baseball player’s offensivestatistics.

Columns in the array are self-consistent: A column has the same meaning in every row. If a column contains a player’s last name in one row, the column must contain a player’s last name in all rows. The order in which the rows and columns appear in the array has no significance. As far as the DBMS is concerned, it doesn’t matter which column is first, which is next, and which is last. The same is true of rows. The DBMS processes the table the same way regardless of the organization.

Every column in a database table embodies a single attribute of the table, just like that baseball card. The column’s meaning is the same for every row of the table. A table may, for example, contain the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of all an organization’s customers. Each row in the table (also called a record, or a tuple) holds the data for a single customer. Each column holds a single attribute — such as customer number, customer name, customer street, customer city, customer state, customer postal code, or customer telephone number. Figure 1-3 shows some of the rows and columns of such a table.

FIGURE 1-3: Each database row contains a record; each database column holds a single attribute.

Remember The relations in this database model correspond to tables in any database based on the model. Try to say that ten times fast.

Enjoy the view

One of my favorite views is of the Yosemite Valley from the mouth of the Wawona Tunnel, late on a spring afternoon. Golden light bathes the sheer face of El Capitan, Half Dome glistens in the distance, and Bridal Veil Falls forms a silver cascade of sparkling water, while wispy clouds weave a tapestry across the sky. Databases have views as well — even if they’re not quite that picturesque. The beauty of database views is their sheer usefulness when you’re working with your data.

Tables can contain many columns and rows. Sometimes all that data interests you, and sometimes it doesn’t. Only some columns of a table may interest you, or perhaps you want to see only rows that satisfy a certain condition. Some columns of one table and some other columns of a related table may interest you. To eliminate data that isn’t relevant to your current needs, you can create a view — a subset of a database that an application can process. It may contain parts of one or more tables.

Remember Views are sometimes called virtual tables. To the application or the user, views behave the same as tables. Views, however, have no independent existence. Views allow you to look at data, but views are not part of the data.

Say, for example, that you’re working with a database that has a CUSTOMER table and an INVOICE table. The CUSTOMER table has the columns CustomerID, FirstName, LastName, Street, City, State, Zipcode, and Phone. The INVOICE table has the columns InvoiceNumber, CustomerID, Date, TotalSale, TotalRemitted, and FormOfPayment.

A national sales manager wants to look at a screen that contains only the customer's first name, last name, and telephone number. Creating from the CUSTOMER table a view that contains only the FirstName, LastName, and Phone columns enables the manager to view what he or she needs without having to see all the unwanted data in the other columns. Figure 1-4 shows the derivation of the national sales manager's view.

FIGURE 1-4: The sales manager’s view derives from the CUSTOMER table.

A branch manager may want to look at the names and phone numbers of all customers whose zip codes fall between 90000 and 93999 (southern and central California). A view that places a restriction on the rows it retrieves, as well as the columns it displays, does the job. Figure 1-5 shows the sources for the columns in the branch manager’s view.

FIGURE 1-5: The branch manager’s view includes only certain rows from the CUSTOMER table.

The accounts-payable manager may want to look at customer names from the CUSTOMER table and Date, TotalSale, TotalRemitted, and FormOfPayment from the INVOICE table, where TotalRemitted is less than TotalSale. The latter would be the case if full payment hasn't yet been made. This need requires a view that draws from both tables. Figure 1-6 shows data flowing into the accounts-payable manager’s view from both the CUSTOMER and INVOICE tables.

FIGURE 1-6: The accounts-payable manager’s view draws from two tables.

Views are useful because they enable you to extract and format database data without physically altering the stored data. They also protect the data that you don’t want to show, because they don’t contain it. Chapter 6 illustrates how to create a view by using SQL.

Schemas, domains, and constraints

A database is more than a collection of tables. Additional structures, on several levels, help to maintain the data’s integrity. A database’s schema provides an overall organization to the tables. The domain of a table column tells you what values you may store in the column. You can apply constraints to a database table to prevent anyone (including yourself) from storing invalid data in the table.

Schemas

The structure of an entire database is its schema, or conceptual view. This structure is sometimes also called the complete logical view of the database. The schema is metadata — as such, it’s part of the database. The metadata itself, which describes the database’s structure, is stored in tables that are just like the tables that store the regular data. Even metadata is data; that’s the beauty of it.

Domains

An attribute of a relation (that is, a column of a table) can assume some finite number of values. The set of all such values is the domain of the attribute.

Say, for example, that you’re an automobile dealer who handles the newly introduced Curarri GT 4000 sports coupe. You keep track of the cars you have in stock in a database table that you name INVENTORY. You name one of the table columns Color, which holds the exterior color of each car. The GT 4000 comes in only four colors: blazing crimson, midnight black, snowflake white, and metallic gray. Those four colors are the domain of the Color attribute.

Constraints

Constraints are an important, although often overlooked, component of a database. Constraints are rules that determine what values the table attributes can assume.

By applying tight constraints to a column, you can prevent people from entering invalid data into that column. Of course, every value that is legitimately in the domain of the column must satisfy all the column's constraints. As I mention in the preceding section, a column’s domain is the set of all values that the column can contain. A constraint is a restriction on what a column may contain. The characteristics of a table column, plus the constraints that apply to that column, determine the column’s domain.

In the auto dealership example, you can constrain the database to accept only those four values (mentioned in the preceding section) in the Color column. If a data entry operator then tries to enter in the Color column a value of, for example, forest green, the system refuses to accept the entry. Data entry can't proceed until the operator enters a valid value into the Color field.

You may wonder what happens when Curarri AutoWerks decides to offer a forest-green version of the GT 4000 as a mid-year option. The answer is (drum roll, please) job security for database-maintenance programmers. This kind of thing happens all the time and requires updates to the database structure. Only people who know how to modify the database structure (such as you) will be able to prevent a major snafu.

The object model challenged the relational model

The relational model has been fantastically successful in a wide variety of application areas. However, it does not do everything that anyone would ever want. The limitations have been made more visible by the rise in popularity of object-oriented programming languages such as C++, Java, and C#. Such languages are capable of handling more complex problems than traditional languages due to their advanced features, such as user-extensible type systems, encapsulation, inheritance, dynamic binding of methods, complex and composite objects, and object identity.

I am not going to explain all that jargon in this book (although I do touch on some of these terms later). Suffice it to say that the classic relational model doesn’t mesh well with many of these features. As a result, database management systems based on the object model have been developed. However, the idea never really took off. Although object-oriented programming languages have become very popular, object-oriented databases have not.

Final score: Relational databases 1, object-oriented databases 0.

The object-relational model

Database designers, like everyone else, are constantly searching for the best of all possible worlds. They mused, Wouldn’t it be great if we could have the advantages of an object-oriented database system and still retain compatibility with the relational system that we know and love? This kind of thinking led to the hybrid object-relational model. Object-relational DBMSs extend the relational model to include support for object-oriented data modeling. Object-oriented features have been added to the international SQL standard, allowing relational DBMS vendors to transform their products into object-relational DBMSs, while retaining compatibility with the standard. Thus, whereas the SQL-92 standard describes a purely relational database model, SQL:1999 describes an object-relational database model. SQL:2003 has more object-oriented features, and subsequent versions of the SQL standard have gone even further in that direction.

In this book, I describe ISO/IEC international standard SQL. (If you’re curious, IEC stands for International Electrotechnical Commission, but nobody really cares about that. How many people know what the letters in the acronym LASER stand for?) The system described by the ISO/IEC SQL standard is primarily a relational database model. I also include the object-oriented extensions to the standard that were introduced in SQL:1999 and the additional extensions included in later versions. The object-oriented features of the new standard allow developers to apply SQL databases to problems that are too complex to address with the older, purely relational, paradigm. Vendors of DBMS systems are incorporating the object-oriented features in the ISO standard into their products. Some of these features have been present for years, but others are yet to be included.

Database Design Considerations

A database is a representation of a physical or conceptual structure, such as an organization, an automobile assembly, or the performance statistics of all the major-league baseball clubs. The accuracy of the representation depends on the level of detail of the database design. The amount of effort that you put into database design should depend on the type of information you want to get out of the database. Too much detail is a waste of effort, time, and hard-drive space. Too little detail may render the database worthless.

Tip Decide how much detail you need now and how much you may need in the future — and then provide exactly that level of detail in your design (no more and no less). But don’t be surprised if you have to adjust the design eventually to meet changing real-world needs.

Remember Today’s database management systems, complete with attractive graphical user interfaces and intuitive design tools, can give the would-be database designer a false sense of security. These systems make designing a database seem comparable to building a spreadsheet or engaging in some other relatively straightforward task. No such luck. Database design is difficult. If you do it incorrectly, not only is your database likely to suffer from poor performance, but it also may well become gradually more corrupt as time goes on. Often the problem doesn’t turn up until after you devote a great deal of effort to data entry. By the time you know that you have a problem, it’s already serious. In many cases, the only solution is to completely redesign the database and reenter all the data. The up side is that by the time you finish your second version of the same database, you realize how much better you understand database design.

Chapter 2

SQL Fundamentals

IN THIS CHAPTER

Bullet Understanding SQL

Bullet Clearing up SQL misconceptions

Bullet Taking a look at the different SQL standards

Bullet Getting familiar with standard SQL commands and reserved words

Bullet Representing numbers, characters, dates, times, and other data types

Bullet Exploring null values and constraints

Bullet Putting SQL to work in a client/server system

Bullet Considering SQL on a network

SQL is a flexible language that you can use in a variety of ways. It’s the most widely used tool for communicating with a relational database. In this chapter, I explain what SQL is and isn’t — specifically, what distinguishes SQL from other types of computer languages. Then I introduce the commands and data types that standard SQL supports and I explain two key concepts: null values and constraints. Finally, I give an overview of how SQL fits into the client/server environment, as well as the Internet and organizational intranets.

What SQL Is and Isn’t

The first thing to understand about SQL is that SQL isn’t a procedural language, as are Python, C, C++, C#, and Java. To solve a problem in a procedural language, you write a procedure — a sequence of commands that performs one specific operation after another until the task is complete. The procedure may be a straightforward linear sequence or may loop back on itself, but in either case, the programmer specifies the order of execution.

SQL, on the other hand, is nonprocedural. To solve a problem using SQL, simply tell SQL what you want (as if you were talking to Aladdin’s genie) instead of telling the system how to get you what you want. The database management system (DBMS) decides the best way to get you what you request.

All right. I just told you that SQL is not a procedural language — and that’s essentially true. However, millions of programmers out there (and you’re probably one of them) are accustomed to solving problems in a procedural manner. So, in recent years, there has been a lot of pressure to add some procedural functionality to SQL — and SQL now incorporates features of a procedural language: BEGIN blocks, IF statements, functions, and (yes) procedures. With these facilities added, you can store programs at the server, where multiple clients can use your programs repeatedly.

To illustrate what I mean by tell the system what you want, suppose you have an EMPLOYEE table from which you want to retrieve the rows that correspond to all your senior people. You want to define a senior person as anyone older than age 40 or anyone earning more than $100,000 per year. You can make the desired retrieval by using the following query:

SELECT * FROM EMPLOYEE WHERE Age > 40 OR Salary > 100000 ;

This statement retrieves all rows from the EMPLOYEE table where either the value in the Age column is greater than 40 or the value in the Salary column is greater than 100,000. In SQL, you don't have to specify how the information is retrieved. The database engine examines the database and decides for itself how to fulfill your request. You need only specify what data you want to retrieve.

Remember A query is a question you ask the database. If any of the data in the database satisfies the conditions of your query, SQL retrieves that data.

Current SQL implementations lack many of the basic programming constructs that are fundamental to most other languages. Real-world applications usually require at least some of these programming constructs, which is why SQL is actually a data sublanguage. Even with the extensions that were added in 1999, 2003, 2005, 2008, and 2011, you still have to use SQL in combination with a procedural language (such as C++) to create a complete application.

You can extract information from a database in one of two ways:

Make an ad hoc query from your keyboard by just typing an SQL statement and reading the results from the screen. Queries from the keyboard are appropriate when you want a quick answer to a specific question. To meet an immediate need, you may require information that you never needed before from a database. You’re likely never to need that information again, either, but you need it now. Enter the appropriate SQL query statement from the keyboard, and in due time, the result appears on your screen.

Execute a program that collects information from the database and then reports on the information either onscreen or in a printed report. Incorporating an SQL query directly into a program is a good way to run a complex query that you’re likely to run again in the future. That way, you can formulate a query just once for use as often as you want. Chapter 16 explains how to incorporate SQL code into programs written in another programming language.

A (Very) Little History

SQL originated in one of IBM’s research laboratories, as did relational database theory. In the early 1970s, as IBM researchers developed early relational DBMS (or RDBMS) systems, they created a data sublanguage to operate on these systems. They named the pre-release version of this sublanguage SEQUEL (Structured English QUEry Language). However, when it came time to formally release their query language as a product, they found that another company had already trademarked the product name Sequel. Therefore, the marketing geniuses at IBM decided to give the released product a name that was different from SEQUEL but still recognizable as a member of the same family. So they named it SQL, pronounced ess-que-ell. Although the official pronunciation is ess-que-ell, people had become accustomed to pronouncing it Sequel in the early pre-release days and continued to do so. That practice has persisted to the present day; some people will say Sequel and others will say S-Q-L, but they are both talking about the same thing.

Technicalstuff The syntax of SQL is a form of structured English, which is where its original name came from. However, SQL is not a structured language in the sense that computer scientists understand that term. Thus, despite the assumptions of many people, SQL is not an acronym standing for structured query language. It is a sequence of three letters that don’t stand for anything, just like the name of the C language does not stand for anything.

IBM’s work with relational databases and SQL was well known in the industry even before IBM introduced its SQL/DS relational database (RDBMS) product in 1981. By that time, Relational Software, Inc. (now Oracle Corporation) had already released its first RDBMS. These early products immediately set the standard for a new class of database management systems. They incorporated SQL, which became the de facto standard for data sublanguages. Vendors of other relational database management systems came out with their own versions of SQL. Typically, these other implementations contained all the core functionality of the IBM products, extended in ways that took advantage of the particular strengths of their own RDBMS product. As a result, although nearly all vendors used some form of SQL, compatibility between platforms was poor.

Remember An implementation is a specific RDBMS running on a specific hardware platform.

Soon a movement began, to create a universally recognized SQL standard to which everyone could adhere. In 1986, ANSI (the American National Standards Institute) released a formal standard it named SQL-86. ANSI updated that standard in 1989 to SQL-89 and again in 1992 to SQL-92. As DBMS vendors proceed through new releases of their products, they try to bring their implementations ever closer to this standard. This effort has brought the goal of true SQL portability much closer to reality.

Remember The most recent full version of the SQL standard is SQL:2016 (ISO/IEC 9075-X:2016). In this book, I describe SQL as SQL:2016 defines the language. Every specific SQL implementation differs from the standard to a certain extent. Because the complete SQL standard is comprehensive, currently available implementations are unlikely to support it fully. However, DBMS vendors are working to support a core subset of the standard SQL language. The full ISO/IEC standard is available for purchase at www.iso.org/search.html?q=iso%209075, but you probably don’t want to buy it unless you intend to create your own ISO/IEC SQL standard database management system. The standard is highly technical and virtually incomprehensible to anyone other than a computer language scholar.

SQL Statements

The SQL command language consists of a limited number of statements that perform three functions of data handling: Some of them define data, some manipulate data, and others control data. I cover the data-definition statements and data-manipulation statements in Chapters 4 through 12; I detail the data-control statements in Chapter 14.

To comply with SQL:2016, an implementation must include a basic set of core features. It may also include extensions to the core set (which the SQL:2016 specification also describes). Table 2-1 lists the core plus the extended SQL:2016 statements. It’s quite a list. If you’re among those programmers who love to try out new capabilities, rejoice.