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 SQL programming language - Definition 

Structured Query Language (SQL) is the most popular computer language used to create, modify and query databases.

Technically, SQL is a declarative computer language for use with "quasi-relational databases". Theorists note that many of the original SQL features were inspired by, but in violation of, tuple calculus. Recent extensions to SQL achieved relational completeness, but have worsened the violations, as documented in The Third Manifesto.

Contents
1 Origins & Versions
2 Description of SQL
3 SQL keywords
4 Database systems using SQL
5 Possible criticisms of SQL
6 Alternatives to SQL
7 External links

Origins & Versions

A seminal paper, "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks" (http://www.acm.org/classics/nov95/toc.html), by Dr. Edgar F. Codd, was published in June,1970 in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) journal, Communications of the ACM. Codd's model became widely accepted as the definitive model for relational database management systems (RDBMS).

During the 1970s, a group at IBM's San Jose research center developed a database system "System R" based upon Codd's model. Structured English Query Language ("SEQUEL") was designed to manipulate and retrieve data stored in System R. The acronym SEQUEL was later condensed to SQL due to a trademark dispute (the word 'SEQUEL' was held as a trade mark by the Hawker-Siddeley aircraft company of the UK).

In 1979, Relational Software, Inc. (now Oracle Corporation) introduced the first commercially available implementation of SQL and, soon, many vendors developed dialects of it.

SQL was adopted as a standard by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in 1986 and ISO in 1987. In their SQL standard, the ANSI declared that the official pronunciation for SQL is "es queue el", although many English-speaking database professionals still pronounce the name of the language as sequel. Considering SQL is an acronym (like CNN, FBI, CIA), and not an abbreviation, this is technically not correct.

The SQL standard has gone through a number of revisions:

Year Name Alias Comments
1986 SQL-86 SQL-87 First published by ANSI. Ratified by ISO in 1987.
1989 SQL-89 Minor revision.
1992 SQL-92 SQL2 Major revision.
1999 SQL:1999 SQL3 Added regular expression matching, recursive queries, triggers, non-scalar types and some object-oriented features. (The last two are somewhat controversial and not yet widely supported.)
2003 SQL:2003   Introduced XML-related features, window functions, standardized sequences and columns with auto-generated values (including identity-columns).

(See Eisenberg et al.: SQL:2003 Has Been Published (http://www.acm.org/sigmod/record/issues/0403/index.html#standards).)


The SQL standard is not freely available. SQL:2003 may be purchased from ISO (http://www.iso.org/) or ANSI (http://webstore.ansi.org/). A late draft is available as a zip archive (http://www.wiscorp.com/sql/sql_2003_standard.zip) from Whitemarsh Information Systems Corporation (http://www.wiscorp.com/). The zip archives contains a number of PDF files that define the parts of the SQL:2003 specification.

Although SQL is defined by both ANSI and ISO, there are many extensions to and variations on the version of the language defined by these standards bodies. Many of these extensions are of a proprietary nature, such as Oracle Corporation's PL/SQL or Sybase and Microsoft's Transact-SQL. It is also not uncommon for commercial implementations to omit support for basic features of the standard, such as the DATE or TIME data types, preferring some variant of their own. As a result, in contrast to ANSI C or ANSI Fortran, which can usually be ported from platform to platform without major structural changes, SQL code can rarely be ported between database systems without major modifications. There are several reasons for this lack of portability between database systems:

  • the complexity and size of the SQL standard means that not all databases implement the entire standard.
  • the standard does not specify database behavior in several important areas (e.g. indexes), leaving it up to implementations of the standard to decide how to behave.
  • the SQL standard precisely specifies the syntax that a conformant database system must implement. However, the standard's specification of the semantics of language constructs is less well-defined, leading to areas of ambiguity.
  • many database vendors have large existing customer bases; where the SQL standard conflicts with the prior behavior of the vendor's database, the vendor may be unwilling to break backward compatibility.
  • some believe the lack of compatibility between database systems is intentional in order to ensure vendor lock-in.

As the name implies, SQL is designed for a specific, limited purpose -- querying data contained in a relational database. As such, it is a set-based, declarative computer language rather than an imperative language such as C or BASIC which, being programming languages, are designed to solve a much broader set of problems. Language extensions such as PL/SQL are designed to address this by turning SQL into a full-fledged programming language while maintaining SQL's current advantages. Another approach is to allow programming language code to be embedded in and interact with the database. For example, Oracle and others include Java in the database, while PostgreSQL allows functions to be written in Perl, Tcl, or C, among other languages.

One joke about SQL is that "SQL is neither Structured, nor a Language." This is founded on the notion that pure SQL is not a programming language since it is not Turing complete.

Description of SQL

Like some database-oriented fourth-generation programming languages such as Focus or SAS, SQL assumes a default file structure (data layout), and automates the process of identifying files to the operating system, opening the input file, reading the next record, opening the output file, writing the next record, and closing the files. This allows the user/programmer to concentrate on the details of working with the data within each record, in effect working almost entirely within an implicit program loop that runs for each record.

Compared to general-purpose programming languages, this structure allows the user/programmer to be less familiar with the technical details of the data and how it is stored, and relatively more familiar with the information contained in the data. This blurs the line between user and programmer, appealing to individuals who fall more into the 'business' or 'research' area and less in the 'information technology' area. This in turn has the double edged result of allowing rapid answers to business or research questions, even ones requring several iterations to get from the initial results to a final answer; but also contributing to the construction of a large body of badly written and impossible to maintain source code.

SQL contrasts with the more powerful database-oriented fourth-generation programming languages such as Focus or SAS, however, in its relative functional simplicity and simpler command set. This greatly reduces the degree of difficulty involved in maintaining the worst SQL source code, but it also makes programming such questions as 'Who had the top ten scores?' more difficult, leading to the development of procedural extensions, discussed above. However, it also makes it possible for SQL source code to be produced (and optimized) by software, leading to the development of a number of natural language database query languages, as well as 'drag and drop' database programming packages with 'object oriented' interfaces. Often these allow the resultant SQL source code to be examined, for educational purposes, further enhancement, or to be used in a different environment.

SQL keywords

SQL keywords fall into several groups.

First there are the standard Data Manipulation Language (DML) elements. DML is the subset of the language used to query a database and add, update and delete data.

  • SELECT is used to retrieve zero or more rows from one or more tables in a database. In most applications, SELECT is the most commonly used DML command. In specifying a SELECT query, the user specifies a description of the desired result set, but they do not specify what physical operations must be executed to produce that result set. Translating the query into an optimal "query plan" is left to the database system, more specifically to the query optimiser.
    • Commonly available keywords related to SELECT include:
      • WHERE is used to identify which rows to be retrieved, or applied to GROUP BY.
      • GROUP BY is used to combine rows with related values into elements of a smaller set of rows.
      • HAVING is used to identify which rows, following a GROUP BY, are to be retrieved.
      • ORDER BY is used to identify which columns are used to sort the resulting data.
  • INSERT is used to add zero or more rows (formally tuples) to an existing table.
  • UPDATE is used to modify the values of a set of existing table rows.
  • DELETE removes zero or more existing rows from a table.

Three other keywords could be said to fall into DML:

  • COMMIT causes all data changes in a transaction to be made permanent.
  • ROLLBACK causes all data changes since the last COMMIT or ROLLBACK to be discarded, so that the state of the data is "rolled back" to the way it was prior to those changes being requested.

COMMIT and ROLLBACK interact with areas such as transaction control and locking. Strictly, both terminate any open transaction and release any locks held on data. In the absence of a BEGIN WORK or similar statement, the semantics of SQL are implementation-dependent.

The second group of keywords is the Data Definition Language (DDL). DDL allows the user to define new tables and associated elements. Most commercial SQL databases have proprietary extensions in their DDL, which allow control over proprietary and nonstandard, but usually operationally vital, elements of the specific system.

The most basic items of DDL are the CREATE and DROP commands.

  • CREATE causes an object (a table, for example) to be created within the database.
  • DROP causes an existing object within the database to be deleted, usually irretrievably.

Some database systems also have an ALTER command, which permits the user to modify an existing object in various ways - for example, adding a column to an existing table.

The third group of SQL keywords is the Data Control Language (DCL). DCL handles the authorisation aspects of data and permits the user to control who has access to see or manipulate data within the database.

Its two main keywords are:

  • GRANT - authorises a user to perform an operation or a set of operations.
  • REVOKE - removes or restricts the capability of a user to perform an operation or a set of operations.

Database systems using SQL

Possible criticisms of SQL

  • The language syntax is unnecessarily complex (sometimes called "COBOL-like").
  • It does not provide a standard way to split large commands into multiple smaller ones that reference each other by name. This tends to result in "run-on SQL sentences".
  • Implementations are inconsistent between vendors.
  • It is too difficult a syntax for DBAs to extend.
  • The syntax of INSERT and UPDATE differ, which can be difficult to work with.
  • Over-reliance on "NULLs", which many consider a flawed or over-used concept.

Alternatives to SQL

External links


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