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Structured Query Language (SQL) (pronounced /ˌɛsˌkjuˈɛl/ S-Q-L; or alternatively as /ˈsiːkwəl/ "sequel") is a domain-specific language used to manage data, especially in a relational database management system (RDBMS). It is particularly useful in handling structured data, i.e., data incorporating relations among entities and variables.
Paradigm | Declarative |
---|---|
Family | Query language |
Designed by | Donald D. Chamberlin Raymond F. Boyce |
Developer | ISO/IEC JTC 1 (Joint Technical Committee 1) / SC 32 (Subcommittee 32) / WG 3 (Working Group 3) |
First appeared | 1974 |
Stable release | SQL:2023 / June 2023 |
Typing discipline | Static, strong |
OS | Cross-platform |
Website | www |
Major implementations | |
Many | |
Dialects | |
| |
Influenced by | |
Datalog | |
Influenced | |
CQL, LINQ, SPARQL, SOQL, PowerShell,JPQL, jOOQ, N1QL, GQL | |
|
Filename extension | .sql |
---|---|
Internet media type | application/sql |
Developed by | ISO/IEC |
Initial release | 1986 |
Type of format | Database |
Standard | ISO/IEC 9075 |
Open format? | Yes |
Website | www |
Introduced in the 1970s, SQL offered two main advantages over older read–write APIs such as ISAM or VSAM. Firstly, it introduced the concept of accessing many records with one single command. Secondly, it eliminates the need to specify how to reach a record, i.e., with or without an index.
Originally based upon relational algebra and tuple relational calculus, SQL consists of many types of statements, which may be informally classed as sublanguages, commonly: Data query Language (DQL), Data Definition Language (DDL), Data Control Language (DCL), and Data Manipulation Language (DML).
The scope of SQL includes data query, data manipulation (insert, update, and delete), data definition (schema creation and modification), and data access control. Although SQL is essentially a declarative language (4GL), it also includes procedural elements.
SQL was one of the first commercial languages to use Edgar F. Codd's relational model. The model was described in his influential 1970 paper, "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks". Despite not entirely adhering to the relational model as described by Codd, SQL became the most widely used database language.
SQL became a standard of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in 1986 and of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in 1987. Since then, the standard has been revised multiple times to include a larger set of features and incorporate common extensions. Despite the existence of standards, virtually no implementations in existence adhere to it fully, and most SQL code requires at least some changes before being ported to different database systems.
History
SQL was initially developed at IBM by Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce after learning about the relational model from Edgar F. Codd in the early 1970s. 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 Jose Research Laboratory had developed during the 1970s.
Chamberlin and Boyce's first attempt at a relational database language was SQUARE (Specifying Queries in A Relational Environment), but it was difficult to use due to subscript/superscript notation. After moving to the San Jose Research Laboratory in 1973, they began work on a sequel to SQUARE. The original name SEQUEL, which is widely regarded as a pun on QUEL, the query language of Ingres, was later changed to SQL (dropping the vowels) because "SEQUEL" was a trademark of the UK-based Hawker Siddeley Dynamics Engineering Limited company. The label SQL later became the acronym for Structured Query Language.
After testing SQL at customer test sites to determine the usefulness and practicality of the system, IBM began developing commercial products based on their System R prototype, including System/38, SQL/DS, and IBM Db2, which were commercially available in 1979, 1981, and 1983, respectively.
In the late 1970s, Relational Software, Inc. (now Oracle Corporation) saw the potential of the concepts described by Codd, Chamberlin, and Boyce, and developed their own SQL-based RDBMS with aspirations of selling it to the U.S. Navy, Central Intelligence Agency, and other U.S. government agencies. In June 1979, Relational Software introduced one of the first commercially available implementations of SQL, Oracle V2 (Version2) for VAX computers.
By 1986, ANSI and ISO standard groups officially adopted the standard "Database Language SQL" language definition. New versions of the standard were published in 1989, 1992, 1996, 1999, 2003, 2006, 2008, 2011, 2016 and most recently, 2023.
Interoperability and standardization
Overview
SQL implementations are incompatible between vendors and do not necessarily completely follow standards. In particular, date and time syntax, string concatenation, NULL
s, and comparison case sensitivity vary from vendor to vendor. PostgreSQL and Mimer SQL strive for standards compliance, though PostgreSQL does not adhere to the standard in all cases. For example, the folding of unquoted names to lower case in PostgreSQL is incompatible with the SQL standard, which says that unquoted names should be folded to upper case. Thus, according to the standard, Foo
should be equivalent to FOO
, not foo
.
Popular implementations of SQL commonly omit support for basic features of Standard SQL, such as the DATE
or TIME
data types. The most obvious such examples, and incidentally the most popular commercial and proprietary SQL DBMSs, are Oracle (whose DATE
behaves as DATETIME
, and lacks a TIME
type) and MS SQL Server (before the 2008 version). As a result, SQL code can rarely be ported between database systems without modifications.
Reasons for incompatibility
Several reasons for the lack of portability between database systems include:
- The complexity and size of the SQL standard means that most implementers do not support the entire standard.
- The SQL standard does not specify the database behavior in some important areas (e.g., indices, file storage), leaving implementations to decide how to behave.
- The SQL standard defers some decisions to individual implementations, such as how to name a results column that was not named explicitly.: 207
- The SQL standard precisely specifies the syntax that a conforming database system must implement. However, the standard's specification of the semantics of language constructs is less well-defined, leading to ambiguity.
- Many database vendors have large existing customer bases; where the newer version of the SQL standard conflicts with the prior behavior of the vendor's database, the vendor may be unwilling to break backward compatibility.
- Little commercial incentive exists for vendors to make changing database suppliers easier (see vendor lock-in).
- Users evaluating database software tend to place other factors such as performance higher in their priorities than standards conformance.
Standardization history
SQL was adopted as a standard by the ANSI in 1986 as SQL-86 and the ISO in 1987. It is maintained by ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information technology, Subcommittee SC 32, Data management and interchange.
Until 1996, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) data-management standards program certified SQL DBMS compliance with the SQL standard. Vendors now self-certify the compliance of their products.
The original standard declared that the official pronunciation for "SQL" was an initialism: /ˌɛsˌkjuːˈɛl/ ("ess cue el"). Regardless, many English-speaking database professionals (including Donald Chamberlin himself) use the acronym-like pronunciation of /ˈsiːkwəl/ ("sequel"), mirroring the language's prerelease development name, "SEQUEL".
The SQL standard has gone through a number of revisions:
Year | Official standard | Informal name | Comments |
---|---|---|---|
1986, 1987 | ANSI X3.135:1986, ISO/IEC 9075:1987, FIPS PUB 127 | , SQL-87 | First formalized by ANSI, adopted as FIPS PUB 127 |
1989 | ANSI X3.135-1989, ISO/IEC 9075:1989, FIPS PUB 127-1 | Minor revision that added integrity constraints, adopted as FIPS PUB 127-1 | |
1992 | ANSI X3.135-1992, ISO/IEC 9075:1992, FIPS PUB 127-2 | SQL-92, SQL2 | Major revision (ISO 9075), Entry Level SQL-92, adopted as FIPS PUB 127-2 |
1999 | ISO/IEC 9075:1999 | SQL:1999, SQL3 | Added regular expression matching, recursive queries (e.g., transitive closure), triggers, support for procedural and control-of-flow statements, nonscalar types (arrays), and some object-oriented features (e.g., structured types), support for embedding SQL in Java (SQL/OLB) and vice versa (SQL/JRT) |
2003 | ISO/IEC 9075:2003 | SQL:2003 | Introduced XML-related features (SQL/XML), window functions, standardized sequences, and columns with autogenerated values (including identity columns) |
2006 | ISO/IEC 9075-14:2006 | SQL:2006 | Adds Part 14, defines ways that SQL can be used with XML. It defines ways of importing and storing XML data in an SQL database, manipulating it within the database, and publishing both XML and conventional SQL data in XML form. In addition, it lets applications integrate queries into their SQL code with XQuery, the XML Query Language published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), to concurrently access ordinary SQL-data and XML documents. |
2008 | ISO/IEC 9075:2008 | SQL:2008 | Legalizes ORDER BY outside cursor definitions. Adds INSTEAD OF triggers, TRUNCATE statement, FETCH clause |
2011 | ISO/IEC 9075:2011 | SQL:2011 | Adds temporal data (PERIOD FOR) (more information at Temporal database#History). Enhancements for window functions and FETCH clause. |
2016 | ISO/IEC 9075:2016 | SQL:2016 | Adds row pattern matching, polymorphic table functions, operations on JSON data stored in character string fields |
2019 | ISO/IEC 9075-15:2019 | Adds Part 15, multidimensional arrays (MDarray type and operators) | |
2023 | ISO/IEC 9075:2023 | SQL:2023 | Adds data type JSON (SQL/Foundation); Adds Part 16, Property Graph Queries (SQL/PGQ) |
Current standard
The standard is commonly denoted by the pattern: ISO/IEC 9075-n:yyyy Part n: title, or, as a shortcut, ISO/IEC 9075. Interested parties may purchase the standards documents from ISO, IEC, or ANSI. Some old drafts are freely available.
ISO/IEC 9075 is complemented by ISO/IEC 13249: SQL Multimedia and Application Packages and some Technical reports.
Syntax
The SQL language is subdivided into several language elements, including:
- Clauses, which are constituent components of statements and queries. (In some cases, these are optional.)
- Expressions, which can produce either scalar values, or tables consisting of columns and rows of data
- Predicates, which specify conditions that can be evaluated to SQL three-valued logic (3VL) (true/false/unknown) or Boolean truth values and are used to limit the effects of statements and queries, or to change program flow.
- Queries, which retrieve the data based on specific criteria. This is an important element of SQL.
- Statements, which may have a persistent effect on schemata and data, or may control transactions, program flow, connections, sessions, or diagnostics.
- SQL statements also include the semicolon (";") statement terminator. Though not required on every platform, it is defined as a standard part of the SQL grammar.
- Insignificant whitespace is generally ignored in SQL statements and queries, making it easier to format SQL code for readability.
Procedural extensions
SQL is designed for a specific purpose: to query data contained in a relational database. SQL is a set-based, declarative programming language, not an imperative programming language like C or BASIC. However, extensions to Standard SQL add procedural programming language functionality, such as control-of-flow constructs.
In addition to the standard SQL/PSM extensions and proprietary SQL extensions, procedural and object-oriented programmability is available on many SQL platforms via DBMS integration with other languages. The SQL standard defines SQL/JRT extensions (SQL Routines and Types for the Java Programming Language) to support Java code in SQL databases. Microsoft SQL Server 2005 uses the SQLCLR (SQL Server Common Language Runtime) to host managed .NET assemblies in the database, while prior versions of SQL Server were restricted to unmanaged extended stored procedures primarily written in C. PostgreSQL lets users write functions in a wide variety of languages—including Perl, Python, Tcl, JavaScript (PL/V8) and C.
Alternatives
A distinction should be made between alternatives to SQL as a language, and alternatives to the relational model itself. Below are proposed relational alternatives to the SQL language. See navigational database and NoSQL for alternatives to the relational model.
- .QL: object-oriented Datalog
- 4D Query Language (4D QL)
- Datalog: critics suggest that Datalog has two advantages over SQL: it has cleaner semantics, which facilitates program understanding and maintenance, and it is more expressive, in particular for recursive queries.
- HTSQL: URL based query method
- IBM Business System 12 (IBM BS12): one of the first fully relational database management systems, introduced in 1982
- ISBL
- jOOQ: SQL implemented in Java as an internal domain-specific language
- Java Persistence Query Language (JPQL): The query language used by the Java Persistence API and Hibernate persistence library
- JavaScript: MongoDB implements its query language in a JavaScript API.
- LINQ: Runs SQL statements written like language constructs to query collections directly from inside .Net code
- Object Query Language
- QBE (Query By Example) created by Moshè Zloof, IBM 1977
- QUEL introduced in 1974 by the U.C. Berkeley Ingres project, closer to tuple relational calculus than SQL
- XQuery
Distributed SQL processing
Distributed Relational Database Architecture (DRDA) was designed by a workgroup within IBM from 1988 to 1994. DRDA enables network-connected relational databases to cooperate to fulfill SQL requests.
An interactive user or program can issue SQL statements to a local RDB and receive tables of data and status indicators in reply from remote RDBs. SQL statements can also be compiled and stored in remote RDBs as packages and then invoked by package name. This is important for the efficient operation of application programs that issue complex, high-frequency queries. It is especially important when the tables to be accessed are located in remote systems.
The messages, protocols, and structural components of DRDA are defined by the Distributed Data Management Architecture. Distributed SQL processing ala DRDA is distinctive from contemporary distributed SQL databases.
Criticisms
Design
SQL deviates in several ways from its theoretical foundation, the relational model and its tuple calculus. In that model, a table is a set of tuples, while in SQL, tables and query results are lists of rows; the same row may occur multiple times, and the order of rows can be employed in queries (e.g., in the LIMIT clause). Critics argue that SQL should be replaced with a language that returns strictly to the original foundation: for example, see The Third Manifesto by Hugh Darwen and C.J. Date (2006, ISBN 0-321-39942-0).
Orthogonality and completeness
Early specifications did not support major features, such as primary keys. Result sets could not be named, and subqueries had not been defined. These were added in 1992.
The lack of sum types has been described as a roadblock to full use of SQL's user-defined types. JSON support, for example, needed to be added by a new standard in 2016.
Null
The concept of Null is the subject of some debate. The Null marker indicates the absence of a value, and is distinct from a value of 0 for an integer column or an empty string for a text column. The concept of Nulls enforces the 3-valued-logic in SQL, which is a concrete implementation of the general 3-valued logic.
Duplicates
Another popular criticism is that it allows duplicate rows, making integration with languages such as Python, whose data types might make accurately representing the data difficult, in terms of parsing and by the absence of modularity. This is usually avoided by declaring a primary key, or a unique constraint, with one or more columns that uniquely identify a row in the table.
Impedance mismatch
In a sense similar to object–relational impedance mismatch, a mismatch occurs between the declarative SQL language and the procedural languages in which SQL is typically embedded.[citation needed]
SQL data types
The SQL standard defines three kinds of data types (chapter 4.1.1 of SQL/Foundation):
- predefined data types
- constructed types
- user-defined types.
Constructed types are one of ARRAY, MULTISET, REF(erence), or ROW. User-defined types are comparable to classes in object-oriented language with their own constructors, observers, mutators, methods, inheritance, overloading, overwriting, interfaces, and so on. Predefined data types are intrinsically supported by the implementation.
Predefined data types
- Character types
- Character (CHAR)
- Character varying (VARCHAR)
- Character large object (CLOB)
- National character types
- National character (NCHAR)
- National character varying (NCHAR VARYING)
- National character large object (NCLOB)
- Binary types
- Binary (BINARY)
- Binary varying (VARBINARY)
- Binary large object (BLOB)
- Numeric types
- Exact numeric types (NUMERIC, DECIMAL, SMALLINT, INTEGER, BIGINT)
- Approximate numeric types (FLOAT, REAL, DOUBLE PRECISION)
- Decimal floating-point type (DECFLOAT)
- Datetime types (DATE, TIME, TIMESTAMP)
- Interval type (INTERVAL)
- Boolean
- XML (see SQL/XML)
- JSON
See also
- Object database
- List of relational database management systems
- Comparison of relational database management systems
- Comparison of object–relational database management systems
- Query by Example
- SQL reserved words
- SQL syntax
- Oracle PL/SQL
- Microsoft Transact-SQL (T-SQL)
- Online transaction processing (OLTP)
- Online analytical processing (OLAP)
- Data warehouse
- Relational data stream management system
- NoSQL
- MUMPS
- Hierarchical database model
- Star schema
- Snowflake schema
Notes
References
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- Beaulieu, Alan (April 2009). Mary E Treseler (ed.). Learning SQL (2nd ed.). Sebastopol, CA, USA: O'Reilly. ISBN 978-0-596-52083-0.
- Chamberlin, Donald D.; Frana, Philip L. (3 October 2001). "Oral history interview with Donald D. Chamberlin". University Digital Conservancy. hdl:11299/107215. Retrieved 14 January 2020.
We changed the original name "SEQUEL" to SQL because we got a letter from somebody's lawyer that said the name "SEQUEL" belonged to them. We shortened it to SQL, for Structured Query Language, and the product was known as SQL/DS.
- SQL-92, 4.22 SQL-statements, 4.22.1 Classes of SQL-statements "There are at least five ways of classifying SQL-statements:", 4.22.2, SQL statements classified by function "The following are the main classes of SQL-statements:"; SQL:2003 4.11 SQL-statements, and later revisions.
- Chatham, Mark (2012). Structured Query Language By Example - Volume I: Data Query Language. Lulu.com. p. 8. ISBN 9781291199512.
- Codd, Edgar F. (June 1970). "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks". Communications of the ACM. 13 (6): 377–87. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.88.646. doi:10.1145/362384.362685. S2CID 207549016.
- Chapple, Mike. "SQL Fundamentals". Databases. About.com. Archived from the original on 22 February 2009. Retrieved 28 January 2009.
- "Structured Query Language (SQL)". International Business Machines. 27 October 2006. Retrieved 10 June 2007.
- "ISO 9075:1987: Information technology – Database languages – SQL – Part 1: Framework (SQL/Framework)". 1 June 1987.
- Chamberlin, Donald (2012). "Early History of SQL". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 34 (4): 78–82. doi:10.1109/MAHC.2012.61. S2CID 1322572.
- Chamberlin, Donald D; Boyce, Raymond F (1974). "SEQUEL: A Structured English Query Language" (PDF). Proceedings of the 1974 ACM SIGFIDET Workshop on Data Description, Access and Control. Association for Computing Machinery: 249–64. Archived from the original (PDF) on 26 September 2007. Retrieved 9 June 2007.
- Starkey, Jim. "Dynamic SQL, Plumbing, and the Internal API". www.ibphoenix.com. Retrieved 19 January 2023.
- Oppel, Andy (27 February 2004). Databases Demystified. San Francisco, CA: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media. pp. 90–1. ISBN 978-0-07-146960-9.
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- "ISO - ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 32 - Data management and interchange". www.iso.org. Retrieved 2 January 2021.
- "About PostgreSQL". PostgreSQL 9.1 official website. PostgreSQL Global Development Group. 2012. Retrieved 9 March 2012.
PostgreSQL prides itself in standards compliance. Its SQL implementation strongly conforms to the ANSI-SQL:2008 standard
- "Mimer SQL, Built on Standards". Mimer SQL official website. Mimer Information Technology. 2009.
- "4.1. Lexical Structure". PostgreSQL documentation. 2018.
- "(Second Informal Review Draft) ISO/IEC 9075:1992, Database Language SQL, Section 5.2, syntax rule 11". 30 July 1992.
- Lorentz, Diana; Roeser, Mary Beth; Abraham, Sundeep; Amor, Angela; Arora, Geeta; Arora, Vikas; Ashdown, Lance; Baer, Hermann; Bellamkonda, Shrikanth (October 2010) [1996]. "Basic Elements of Oracle SQL: Data Types". Oracle Database SQL Language Reference 11g Release 2 (11.2). Oracle Database Documentation Library. Redwood City, CA: Oracle USA, Inc. Retrieved 29 December 2010.
For each
DATE
value, Oracle stores the following information: century, year, month, date, hour, minute, and second - Lorentz, Diana; Roeser, Mary Beth; Abraham, Sundeep; Amor, Angela; Arora, Geeta; Arora, Vikas; Ashdown, Lance; Baer, Hermann; Bellamkonda, Shrikanth (October 2010) [1996]. "Basic Elements of Oracle SQL: Data Types". Oracle Database SQL Language Reference 11g Release 2 (11.2). Oracle Database Documentation Library. Redwood City, CA: Oracle USA, Inc. Retrieved 29 December 2010.
The datetime data types are
DATE
... - Lorentz, Diana; Roeser, Mary Beth; Abraham, Sundeep; Amor, Angela; Arora, Geeta; Arora, Vikas; Ashdown, Lance; Baer, Hermann; Bellamkonda, Shrikanth (October 2010) [1996]. "Basic Elements of Oracle SQL: Data Types". Oracle Database SQL Language Reference 11g Release 2 (11.2). Oracle Database Documentation Library. Redwood City, CA: Oracle USA, Inc. Retrieved 29 December 2010.
Do not define columns with the following SQL/DS and DB2 data types, because they have no corresponding Oracle data type:...
TIME
- Date, Chris J. (2013). Relational Theory for Computer Professionals: What Relational Databases are Really All About (1. ed.). Sebastopol, Calif: O'Reilly Media. ISBN 978-1-449-36943-9.
- "Finding Aid". X3H2 Records, 1978–95. American National Standards Institute.
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- Melton, Jim; Alan R Simon (1993). "1.2. What is SQL?". Understanding the New SQL: A Complete Guide. Morgan Kaufmann. p. 536. ISBN 978-1-55860-245-8.
SQL (correctly pronounced "ess cue ell," instead of the somewhat common "sequel")...
- Wagner, Michael (2010). SQL/XML:2006 - Evaluierung der Standardkonformität ausgewählter Datenbanksysteme. Diplomica Verlag. p. 100. ISBN 978-3-8366-9609-8.
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Sources
- Codd, Edgar F (June 1970). "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks". Communications of the ACM. 13 (6): 377–87. doi:10.1145/362384.362685. S2CID 207549016.
- Discussion on alleged SQL flaws (C2 wiki)
- C. J. Date with Hugh Darwen: A Guide to the SQL standard : a users guide to the standard database language SQL, 4th ed., Addison Wesley, USA 1997, ISBN 978-0-201-96426-4
External links
- 1995 SQL Reunion: People, Projects, and Politics, by Paul McJones (ed.): transcript of a reunion meeting devoted to the personal history of relational databases and SQL.
- American National Standards Institute. X3H2 Records, 1978–1995 Charles Babbage Institute Collection documents the H2 committee's development of the NDL and SQL standards.
- Oral history interview with Donald D. Chamberlin Charles Babbage Institute In this oral history Chamberlin recounts his early life, his education at Harvey Mudd College and Stanford University, and his work on relational database technology. Chamberlin was a member of the System R research team and, with Raymond F. Boyce, developed the SQL database language. Chamberlin also briefly discusses his more recent research on XML query languages.
Structured Query Language SQL pronounced ˌ ɛ s ˌ k j u ˈ ɛ l S Q L or alternatively as ˈ s iː k w e l sequel is a domain specific language used to manage data especially in a relational database management system RDBMS It is particularly useful in handling structured data i e data incorporating relations among entities and variables SQL Structured Query Language ParadigmDeclarativeFamilyQuery languageDesigned byDonald D Chamberlin Raymond F BoyceDeveloperISO IEC JTC 1 Joint Technical Committee 1 SC 32 Subcommittee 32 WG 3 Working Group 3 First appeared1974 51 years ago 1974 Stable releaseSQL 2023 June 2023 1 year ago 2023 06 Typing disciplineStatic strongOSCross platformWebsitewww wbr iso wbr org wbr standard wbr 76583 wbr htmlMajor implementationsManyDialectsSQL 86 SQL 89 SQL 92 SQL 1999 SQL 2003 SQL 2006 SQL 2008 SQL 2011 SQL 2016 SQL 2023Influenced byDatalogInfluencedCQL LINQ SPARQL SOQL PowerShell JPQL jOOQ N1QL GQLStructured Query Language at WikibooksSQL file format Filename extension sqlInternet media typeapplication sqlDeveloped byISO IECInitial release1986 1986 Type of formatDatabaseStandardISO IEC 9075Open format YesWebsitewww wbr iso wbr org wbr standard wbr 76583 wbr html Introduced in the 1970s SQL offered two main advantages over older read write APIs such as ISAM or VSAM Firstly it introduced the concept of accessing many records with one single command Secondly it eliminates the need to specify how to reach a record i e with or without an index Originally based upon relational algebra and tuple relational calculus SQL consists of many types of statements which may be informally classed as sublanguages commonly Data query Language DQL Data Definition Language DDL Data Control Language DCL and Data Manipulation Language DML The scope of SQL includes data query data manipulation insert update and delete data definition schema creation and modification and data access control Although SQL is essentially a declarative language 4GL it also includes procedural elements SQL was one of the first commercial languages to use Edgar F Codd s relational model The model was described in his influential 1970 paper A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks Despite not entirely adhering to the relational model as described by Codd SQL became the most widely used database language SQL became a standard of the American National Standards Institute ANSI in 1986 and of the International Organization for Standardization ISO in 1987 Since then the standard has been revised multiple times to include a larger set of features and incorporate common extensions Despite the existence of standards virtually no implementations in existence adhere to it fully and most SQL code requires at least some changes before being ported to different database systems HistorySQL was initially developed at IBM by Donald D Chamberlin and Raymond F Boyce after learning about the relational model from Edgar F Codd in the early 1970s 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 Jose Research Laboratory had developed during the 1970s Chamberlin and Boyce s first attempt at a relational database language was SQUARE Specifying Queries in A Relational Environment but it was difficult to use due to subscript superscript notation After moving to the San Jose Research Laboratory in 1973 they began work on a sequel to SQUARE The original name SEQUEL which is widely regarded as a pun on QUEL the query language of Ingres was later changed to SQL dropping the vowels because SEQUEL was a trademark of the UK based Hawker Siddeley Dynamics Engineering Limited company The label SQL later became the acronym for Structured Query Language After testing SQL at customer test sites to determine the usefulness and practicality of the system IBM began developing commercial products based on their System R prototype including System 38 SQL DS and IBM Db2 which were commercially available in 1979 1981 and 1983 respectively In the late 1970s Relational Software Inc now Oracle Corporation saw the potential of the concepts described by Codd Chamberlin and Boyce and developed their own SQL based RDBMS with aspirations of selling it to the U S Navy Central Intelligence Agency and other U S government agencies In June 1979 Relational Software introduced one of the first commercially available implementations of SQL Oracle V2 Version2 for VAX computers By 1986 ANSI and ISO standard groups officially adopted the standard Database Language SQL language definition New versions of the standard were published in 1989 1992 1996 1999 2003 2006 2008 2011 2016 and most recently 2023 Interoperability and standardizationOverview SQL implementations are incompatible between vendors and do not necessarily completely follow standards In particular date and time syntax string concatenation NULLs and comparison case sensitivity vary from vendor to vendor PostgreSQL and Mimer SQL strive for standards compliance though PostgreSQL does not adhere to the standard in all cases For example the folding of unquoted names to lower case in PostgreSQL is incompatible with the SQL standard which says that unquoted names should be folded to upper case Thus according to the standard Foo should be equivalent to FOO not foo Popular implementations of SQL commonly omit support for basic features of Standard SQL such as the DATE or TIME data types The most obvious such examples and incidentally the most popular commercial and proprietary SQL DBMSs are Oracle whose DATE behaves as DATETIME and lacks a TIME type and MS SQL Server before the 2008 version As a result SQL code can rarely be ported between database systems without modifications Reasons for incompatibility Several reasons for the lack of portability between database systems include The complexity and size of the SQL standard means that most implementers do not support the entire standard The SQL standard does not specify the database behavior in some important areas e g indices file storage leaving implementations to decide how to behave The SQL standard defers some decisions to individual implementations such as how to name a results column that was not named explicitly 207 The SQL standard precisely specifies the syntax that a conforming database system must implement However the standard s specification of the semantics of language constructs is less well defined leading to ambiguity Many database vendors have large existing customer bases where the newer version of the SQL standard conflicts with the prior behavior of the vendor s database the vendor may be unwilling to break backward compatibility Little commercial incentive exists for vendors to make changing database suppliers easier see vendor lock in Users evaluating database software tend to place other factors such as performance higher in their priorities than standards conformance Standardization history SQL was adopted as a standard by the ANSI in 1986 as SQL 86 and the ISO in 1987 It is maintained by ISO IEC JTC 1 Information technology Subcommittee SC 32 Data management and interchange Until 1996 the National Institute of Standards and Technology NIST data management standards program certified SQL DBMS compliance with the SQL standard Vendors now self certify the compliance of their products The original standard declared that the official pronunciation for SQL was an initialism ˌ ɛ s ˌ k juː ˈ ɛ l ess cue el Regardless many English speaking database professionals including Donald Chamberlin himself use the acronym like pronunciation of ˈ s iː k w el sequel mirroring the language s prerelease development name SEQUEL The SQL standard has gone through a number of revisions Timeline of SQL language Year Official standard Informal name Comments1986 1987 ANSI X3 135 1986 ISO IEC 9075 1987 FIPS PUB 127 SQL 87 First formalized by ANSI adopted as FIPS PUB 1271989 ANSI X3 135 1989 ISO IEC 9075 1989 FIPS PUB 127 1 Minor revision that added integrity constraints adopted as FIPS PUB 127 11992 ANSI X3 135 1992 ISO IEC 9075 1992 FIPS PUB 127 2 SQL 92 SQL2 Major revision ISO 9075 Entry Level SQL 92 adopted as FIPS PUB 127 21999 ISO IEC 9075 1999 SQL 1999 SQL3 Added regular expression matching recursive queries e g transitive closure triggers support for procedural and control of flow statements nonscalar types arrays and some object oriented features e g structured types support for embedding SQL in Java SQL OLB and vice versa SQL JRT 2003 ISO IEC 9075 2003 SQL 2003 Introduced XML related features SQL XML window functions standardized sequences and columns with autogenerated values including identity columns 2006 ISO IEC 9075 14 2006 SQL 2006 Adds Part 14 defines ways that SQL can be used with XML It defines ways of importing and storing XML data in an SQL database manipulating it within the database and publishing both XML and conventional SQL data in XML form In addition it lets applications integrate queries into their SQL code with XQuery the XML Query Language published by the World Wide Web Consortium W3C to concurrently access ordinary SQL data and XML documents 2008 ISO IEC 9075 2008 SQL 2008 Legalizes ORDER BY outside cursor definitions Adds INSTEAD OF triggers TRUNCATE statement FETCH clause2011 ISO IEC 9075 2011 SQL 2011 Adds temporal data PERIOD FOR more information at Temporal database History Enhancements for window functions and FETCH clause 2016 ISO IEC 9075 2016 SQL 2016 Adds row pattern matching polymorphic table functions operations on JSON data stored in character string fields2019 ISO IEC 9075 15 2019 Adds Part 15 multidimensional arrays MDarray type and operators 2023 ISO IEC 9075 2023 SQL 2023 Adds data type JSON SQL Foundation Adds Part 16 Property Graph Queries SQL PGQ Current standard The standard is commonly denoted by the pattern ISO IEC 9075 n yyyy Part n title or as a shortcut ISO IEC 9075 Interested parties may purchase the standards documents from ISO IEC or ANSI Some old drafts are freely available ISO IEC 9075 is complemented by ISO IEC 13249 SQL Multimedia and Application Packages and some Technical reports SyntaxUPDATE clause UPDATE countries table SET clause SET population column population 1 literal expression WHERE clause WHERE name column USA literal expression predicate statement SQL query displaystyle underbrace left begin array rl textstyle mathtt UPDATE clause mathtt amp mathtt UPDATE overbrace mathtt countries mathtt table textstyle mathtt SET clause amp mathtt SET overbrace mathtt population mathtt column overbrace mathtt population underbrace mathtt 1 mathtt literal mathtt expression textstyle mathtt WHERE clause amp mathtt WHERE underbrace overbrace mathtt name mathtt column mathtt overbrace overbrace mathtt USA mathtt literal mathtt expression mathtt predicate texttt end array right textstyle texttt statement textstyle mathtt SQL query A chart showing several of the SQL language elements comprising a single statement The SQL language is subdivided into several language elements including Clauses which are constituent components of statements and queries In some cases these are optional Expressions which can produce either scalar values or tables consisting of columns and rows of data Predicates which specify conditions that can be evaluated to SQL three valued logic 3VL true false unknown or Boolean truth values and are used to limit the effects of statements and queries or to change program flow Queries which retrieve the data based on specific criteria This is an important element of SQL Statements which may have a persistent effect on schemata and data or may control transactions program flow connections sessions or diagnostics SQL statements also include the semicolon statement terminator Though not required on every platform it is defined as a standard part of the SQL grammar Insignificant whitespace is generally ignored in SQL statements and queries making it easier to format SQL code for readability Procedural extensionsSQL is designed for a specific purpose to query data contained in a relational database SQL is a set based declarative programming language not an imperative programming language like C or BASIC However extensions to Standard SQL add procedural programming language functionality such as control of flow constructs In addition to the standard SQL PSM extensions and proprietary SQL extensions procedural and object oriented programmability is available on many SQL platforms via DBMS integration with other languages The SQL standard defines SQL JRT extensions SQL Routines and Types for the Java Programming Language to support Java code in SQL databases Microsoft SQL Server 2005 uses the SQLCLR SQL Server Common Language Runtime to host managed NET assemblies in the database while prior versions of SQL Server were restricted to unmanaged extended stored procedures primarily written in C PostgreSQL lets users write functions in a wide variety of languages including Perl Python Tcl JavaScript PL V8 and C AlternativesA distinction should be made between alternatives to SQL as a language and alternatives to the relational model itself Below are proposed relational alternatives to the SQL language See navigational database and NoSQL for alternatives to the relational model QL object oriented Datalog 4D Query Language 4D QL Datalog critics suggest that Datalog has two advantages over SQL it has cleaner semantics which facilitates program understanding and maintenance and it is more expressive in particular for recursive queries HTSQL URL based query method IBM Business System 12 IBM BS12 one of the first fully relational database management systems introduced in 1982 ISBL jOOQ SQL implemented in Java as an internal domain specific language Java Persistence Query Language JPQL The query language used by the Java Persistence API and Hibernate persistence library JavaScript MongoDB implements its query language in a JavaScript API LINQ Runs SQL statements written like language constructs to query collections directly from inside Net code Object Query Language QBE Query By Example created by Moshe Zloof IBM 1977 QUEL introduced in 1974 by the U C Berkeley Ingres project closer to tuple relational calculus than SQL XQueryDistributed SQL processingDistributed Relational Database Architecture DRDA was designed by a workgroup within IBM from 1988 to 1994 DRDA enables network connected relational databases to cooperate to fulfill SQL requests An interactive user or program can issue SQL statements to a local RDB and receive tables of data and status indicators in reply from remote RDBs SQL statements can also be compiled and stored in remote RDBs as packages and then invoked by package name This is important for the efficient operation of application programs that issue complex high frequency queries It is especially important when the tables to be accessed are located in remote systems The messages protocols and structural components of DRDA are defined by the Distributed Data Management Architecture Distributed SQL processing ala DRDA is distinctive from contemporary distributed SQL databases CriticismsDesign SQL deviates in several ways from its theoretical foundation the relational model and its tuple calculus In that model a table is a set of tuples while in SQL tables and query results are lists of rows the same row may occur multiple times and the order of rows can be employed in queries e g in the LIMIT clause Critics argue that SQL should be replaced with a language that returns strictly to the original foundation for example see The Third Manifesto by Hugh Darwen and C J Date 2006 ISBN 0 321 39942 0 Orthogonality and completeness Early specifications did not support major features such as primary keys Result sets could not be named and subqueries had not been defined These were added in 1992 The lack of sum types has been described as a roadblock to full use of SQL s user defined types JSON support for example needed to be added by a new standard in 2016 Null The concept of Null is the subject of some debate The Null marker indicates the absence of a value and is distinct from a value of 0 for an integer column or an empty string for a text column The concept of Nulls enforces the 3 valued logic in SQL which is a concrete implementation of the general 3 valued logic Duplicates Another popular criticism is that it allows duplicate rows making integration with languages such as Python whose data types might make accurately representing the data difficult in terms of parsing and by the absence of modularity This is usually avoided by declaring a primary key or a unique constraint with one or more columns that uniquely identify a row in the table Impedance mismatch In a sense similar to object relational impedance mismatch a mismatch occurs between the declarative SQL language and the procedural languages in which SQL is typically embedded citation needed SQL data typesThe SQL standard defines three kinds of data types chapter 4 1 1 of SQL Foundation predefined data types constructed types user defined types Constructed types are one of ARRAY MULTISET REF erence or ROW User defined types are comparable to classes in object oriented language with their own constructors observers mutators methods inheritance overloading overwriting interfaces and so on Predefined data types are intrinsically supported by the implementation Predefined data types Character types Character CHAR Character varying VARCHAR Character large object CLOB National character types National character NCHAR National character varying NCHAR VARYING National character large object NCLOB Binary types Binary BINARY Binary varying VARBINARY Binary large object BLOB Numeric types Exact numeric types NUMERIC DECIMAL SMALLINT INTEGER BIGINT Approximate numeric types FLOAT REAL DOUBLE PRECISION Decimal floating point type DECFLOAT Datetime types DATE TIME TIMESTAMP Interval type INTERVAL Boolean XML see SQL XML JSONSee alsoObject database List of relational database management systems Comparison of relational database management systems Comparison of object relational database management systems Query by Example SQL reserved words SQL syntax Oracle PL SQL Microsoft Transact SQL T SQL Online transaction processing OLTP Online analytical processing OLAP Data warehouse Relational data stream management system NoSQL MUMPS Hierarchical database model Star schema Snowflake schemaNotesReferencesPaul Ryan 24 October 2005 A guided tour of the Microsoft Command Shell Ars Technica Retrieved 10 April 2011 Media Type registration for application sql Internet Assigned Numbers Authority 10 April 2013 Retrieved 10 April 2013 Shafranovich Y April 2013 The application sql Media Type RFC 6922 Internet Engineering Task Force p 3 doi 10 17487 RFC6922 Retrieved 10 April 2013 Beaulieu Alan April 2009 Mary E Treseler ed Learning SQL 2nd ed Sebastopol CA USA O Reilly ISBN 978 0 596 52083 0 Chamberlin Donald D Frana Philip L 3 October 2001 Oral history interview with Donald D Chamberlin University Digital Conservancy hdl 11299 107215 Retrieved 14 January 2020 We changed the original name SEQUEL to SQL because we got a letter from somebody s lawyer that said the name SEQUEL belonged to them We shortened it to SQL for Structured Query Language and the product was known as SQL DS SQL 92 4 22 SQL statements 4 22 1 Classes of SQL statements There are at least five ways of classifying SQL statements 4 22 2 SQL statements classified by function The following are the main classes of SQL statements SQL 2003 4 11 SQL statements and later revisions Chatham Mark 2012 Structured Query Language By Example Volume I Data Query Language Lulu com p 8 ISBN 9781291199512 Codd Edgar F June 1970 A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks Communications of the ACM 13 6 377 87 CiteSeerX 10 1 1 88 646 doi 10 1145 362384 362685 S2CID 207549016 Chapple Mike SQL Fundamentals Databases About com Archived from the original on 22 February 2009 Retrieved 28 January 2009 Structured Query Language SQL International Business Machines 27 October 2006 Retrieved 10 June 2007 ISO 9075 1987 Information technology Database languages SQL Part 1 Framework SQL Framework 1 June 1987 Chamberlin Donald 2012 Early History of SQL IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 34 4 78 82 doi 10 1109 MAHC 2012 61 S2CID 1322572 Chamberlin Donald D Boyce Raymond F 1974 SEQUEL A Structured English Query Language PDF Proceedings of the 1974 ACM SIGFIDET Workshop on Data Description Access and Control Association for Computing Machinery 249 64 Archived from the original PDF on 26 September 2007 Retrieved 9 June 2007 Starkey Jim Dynamic SQL Plumbing and the Internal API www ibphoenix com Retrieved 19 January 2023 Oppel Andy 27 February 2004 Databases Demystified San Francisco CA McGraw Hill Osborne Media pp 90 1 ISBN 978 0 07 146960 9 History of IBM 1978 IBM Archives IBM 23 January 2003 Archived from the original on 17 January 2005 Retrieved 9 June 2007 ISO ISO IEC JTC 1 SC 32 Data management and interchange www iso org Retrieved 2 January 2021 About PostgreSQL PostgreSQL 9 1 official website PostgreSQL Global Development Group 2012 Retrieved 9 March 2012 PostgreSQL prides itself in standards compliance Its SQL implementation strongly conforms to the ANSI SQL 2008 standard Mimer SQL Built on Standards Mimer SQL official website Mimer Information Technology 2009 4 1 Lexical Structure PostgreSQL documentation 2018 Second Informal Review Draft ISO IEC 9075 1992 Database Language SQL Section 5 2 syntax rule 11 30 July 1992 Lorentz Diana Roeser Mary Beth Abraham Sundeep Amor Angela Arora Geeta Arora Vikas Ashdown Lance Baer Hermann Bellamkonda Shrikanth October 2010 1996 Basic Elements of Oracle SQL Data Types Oracle Database SQL Language Reference 11g Release 2 11 2 Oracle Database Documentation Library Redwood City CA Oracle USA Inc Retrieved 29 December 2010 For each DATE value Oracle stores the following information century year month date hour minute and second Lorentz Diana Roeser Mary Beth Abraham Sundeep Amor Angela Arora Geeta Arora Vikas Ashdown Lance Baer Hermann Bellamkonda Shrikanth October 2010 1996 Basic Elements of Oracle SQL Data Types Oracle Database SQL Language Reference 11g Release 2 11 2 Oracle Database Documentation Library Redwood City CA Oracle USA Inc Retrieved 29 December 2010 The datetime data types are DATE Lorentz Diana Roeser Mary Beth Abraham Sundeep Amor Angela Arora Geeta Arora Vikas Ashdown Lance Baer Hermann Bellamkonda Shrikanth October 2010 1996 Basic Elements of Oracle SQL Data Types Oracle Database SQL Language Reference 11g Release 2 11 2 Oracle Database Documentation Library Redwood City CA Oracle USA Inc Retrieved 29 December 2010 Do not define columns with the following SQL DS and DB2 data types because they have no corresponding Oracle data type TIME Date Chris J 2013 Relational Theory for Computer Professionals What Relational Databases are Really All About 1 ed Sebastopol Calif O Reilly Media ISBN 978 1 449 36943 9 Finding Aid X3H2 Records 1978 95 American National Standards Institute Doll Shelley 19 June 2002 Is SQL a Standard Anymore TechRepublic s Builder com TechRepublic Archived from the original on 5 July 2012 Retrieved 12 April 2016 Gillespie Patrick Pronouncing SQL S Q L or Sequel Retrieved 12 February 2012 Melton Jim Alan R Simon 1993 1 2 What is SQL Understanding the New SQL A Complete Guide Morgan Kaufmann p 536 ISBN 978 1 55860 245 8 SQL correctly pronounced ess cue ell instead of the somewhat common sequel Wagner Michael 2010 SQL XML 2006 Evaluierung der Standardkonformitat ausgewahlter Datenbanksysteme Diplomica Verlag p 100 ISBN 978 3 8366 9609 8 SQL 2008 now an approved ISO international standard Sybase July 2008 Archived from the original on 28 June 2011 Krishna Kulkarni Jan Eike Michels September 2012 Temporal features in SQL 2011 PDF SIGMOD Record 41 3 Fred Zemke 2012 What s new in SQL 2011 PDF Oracle Corporation ISO IEC 9075 SQL 1992 draft text SQL 2011 draft Whitemarsh Information Systems Corporation archived from the original Zip on 25 May 2023 ANSI ISO IEC International Standard IS Database Language SQL Part 2 Foundation SQL Foundation 1999 PostgreSQL server programming PostgreSQL 9 1 official documentation postgresql org 2011 Retrieved 9 March 2012 Fernando Saenz Perez Outer Joins in a Deductive Database System PDF Lbd udc es Retrieved 16 January 2017 Reinsch R 1988 Distributed database for SAA IBM Systems Journal 27 3 362 389 doi 10 1147 sj 273 0362 Distributed Relational Database Architecture Reference IBM Corp SC26 4651 0 1990 Brandon Jamie July 2021 Against SQL Retrieved 2 August 2021 SQL 2003 Standard Support in Oracle Database 10g PDF Oracle Oracle Corporation November 2003 Retrieved 27 March 2024 XML supported was added in ANSI SQL 2003 part 14 SourcesCodd Edgar F June 1970 A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks Communications of the ACM 13 6 377 87 doi 10 1145 362384 362685 S2CID 207549016 Discussion on alleged SQL flaws C2 wiki C J Date with Hugh Darwen A Guide to the SQL standard a users guide to the standard database language SQL 4th ed Addison Wesley USA 1997 ISBN 978 0 201 96426 4External linksSQL at Wikipedia s sister projects Definitions from WiktionaryMedia from CommonsTextbooks from WikibooksResources from Wikiversity 1995 SQL Reunion People Projects and Politics by Paul McJones ed transcript of a reunion meeting devoted to the personal history of relational databases and SQL American National Standards Institute X3H2 Records 1978 1995 Charles Babbage Institute Collection documents the H2 committee s development of the NDL and SQL standards Oral history interview with Donald D Chamberlin Charles Babbage Institute In this oral history Chamberlin recounts his early life his education at Harvey Mudd College and Stanford University and his work on relational database technology Chamberlin was a member of the System R research team and with Raymond F Boyce developed the SQL database language Chamberlin also briefly discusses his more recent research on XML query languages Portal Computer programming