What's In It?

World's Longest SQL Poem (for obvious reasons)

All the snake-oil peddlers say, there's a fast and easy way,
To get your SQL program up and running,
But they're silent re the traps, that cause subtly buggy apps,
For to catch the unaware a chasm's yawning!

Date-arithmetic exceptions, auto-rollbacked disconnections,
Bit precisions, overflows, collate coercions,
And how NULL affects your summing, for to keep your DB humming,
You must know what happens in all vendors' versions!

Should this field be DOUBLE PRECISION?
Will logic rules soon see revision?
By the ANSI:Databases sub-committee?
When you DROP should you CASCADE?
How are NATURAL joins made?
Re UNIQUE-keys matching check the nitty-gritty!

Yeah the true and standard facts, you'll avoid those later hacks
That make Structured Query Language such a bore,
You'll find tips and charts aplenty, in this one-thousand-and-twenty
Four page volume (with an index), and yet more!

This book describes the SQL syntax a DBMS must support to comply with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) document ISO/IEC 9075:1999 Database Language SQL, also adopted as the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) document X3.135-1999 Database Language SQL -- familiarly known as SQL3, standard SQL or ANSI SQL. We will use the more familiar terms "SQL" or "SQL3" to describe Standard-conforming SQL in this book, rather than the formal term SQL-99.

It's true that some features discussed in this book aren't in <fill in your DBMS name here>. That's no reason to ignore them, because sooner or later they will be there, due to pressure on serious vendors to adhere to the SQL Standard.

Why Read It?

You need to know SQL so you've been looking for an accurate reference work that describes the entire SQL Standard by way of examples. This is that book.

How much of what you need to know is in this book? Well, it's impossible for a single book to contain everything you need. We guarantee that the coverage is complete for the SQL language itself, and is adequate for subjects that closely relate to SQL. Let's express "what you will know" as a percentage of "what you should know", with an assumption that you're an average person:

"Complete" does not mean that everything which could be said about SQL will be said here. SQL is big. More exactly, it means that we will never refer you to further published material saying "the details are in the official standard document" or "further discussion is outside the scope of this book".

Further Information

When you look at our Table of Contents, you'll see that this book includes several Appendices, but only on the accompanying CD-ROM, to keep the book from becoming too unwieldy. Of the Appendix files, we especially recommend Appendix F, the Glossary. It provides definitions for all the SQL technical terms we use.