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Operators: Operator Description

The document provides an overview of operators, queries, null values, and data manipulation in SQL. It describes various operators like equal, not equal, greater than, and BETWEEN. It explains the components of queries like SELECT, FROM, WHERE, GROUP BY, HAVING, and ORDER BY. It also discusses null values and three-valued logic in SQL. Finally, it summarizes the basic data manipulation statements like INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
57 views8 pages

Operators: Operator Description

The document provides an overview of operators, queries, null values, and data manipulation in SQL. It describes various operators like equal, not equal, greater than, and BETWEEN. It explains the components of queries like SELECT, FROM, WHERE, GROUP BY, HAVING, and ORDER BY. It also discusses null values and three-valued logic in SQL. Finally, it summarizes the basic data manipulation statements like INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE.

Uploaded by

9897856218
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Operators

Operator Description = Equal <> or != Not equal > Greater than < Less than >= Greater than or equal <= Less than or equal BETWEEN Between an inclusive range LIKE Search for a pattern IN To specify multiple possible values for a column Conditional (CASE) expressions SQL has a case/when/then/else/end expression, which was introduced in SQL-92. In its most general form, which is called a "searched case" in the SQL standard, it works like else if in other programming languages:
CASE WHEN n > 0 THEN 'positive' WHEN n < 0 THEN 'negative' ELSE 'zero' END

The WHEN conditions are tested in the order in which they appear in the source. If no ELSE expression is specified, it defaults to ELSE NULL. An abbreviated syntax exists mirroring switch statements; it is called "simple case" in the SQL standard:
CASE n WHEN 1 THEN 'one' WHEN 2 THEN 'two' ELSE 'i cannot count that high' END

This syntax uses implicit equality comparisons, with the usual caveats for comparing with NULL. For the Oracle-SQL dialect, the latter can be shortened to an equivalent DECODE construct:
SELECT DECODE(n, 1, "one", 2, "two", "i cannot count that high") FROM some_table;

The last value is the default; if none is specified, it also defaults to NULL. However, unlike the standard's "simple case", Oracle's DECODE considers two NULLs to be equal with each other.[13]

Queries
The most common operation in SQL is the query, which is performed with the declarative SELECT statement. SELECT retrieves data from one or more tables, or expressions. Standard SELECT statements have no persistent effects on the database. Some non-standard

implementations of SELECT can have persistent effects, such as the SELECT INTO syntax that exists in some databases.[14] Queries allow the user to describe desired data, leaving the database management system (DBMS) responsible for planning, optimizing, and performing the physical operations necessary to produce that result as it chooses. A query includes a list of columns to be included in the final result immediately following the SELECT keyword. An asterisk ("*") can also be used to specify that the query should return all columns of the queried tables. SELECT is the most complex statement in SQL, with optional keywords and clauses that include:

The FROM clause which indicates the table(s) from which data is to be retrieved. The FROM clause can include optional JOIN subclauses to specify the rules for joining tables. The WHERE clause includes a comparison predicate, which restricts the rows returned by the query. The WHERE clause eliminates all rows from the result set for which the comparison predicate does not evaluate to True. The GROUP BY clause is used to project rows having common values into a smaller set of rows. GROUP BY is often used in conjunction with SQL aggregation functions or to eliminate duplicate rows from a result set. The WHERE clause is applied before the GROUP BY clause. The HAVING clause includes a predicate used to filter rows resulting from the GROUP BY clause. Because it acts on the results of the GROUP BY clause, aggregation functions can be used in the HAVING clause predicate. The ORDER BY clause identifies which columns are used to sort the resulting data, and in which direction they should be sorted (options are ascending or descending). Without an ORDER BY clause, the order of rows returned by an SQL query is undefined.

The following is an example of a SELECT query that returns a list of expensive books. The query retrieves all rows from the Book table in which the price column contains a value greater than 100.00. The result is sorted in ascending order by title. The asterisk (*) in the select list indicates that all columns of the Book table should be included in the result set.
SELECT * FROM Book WHERE price > 100.00 ORDER BY title;

The example below demonstrates a query of multiple tables, grouping, and aggregation, by returning a list of books and the number of authors associated with each book.
SELECT Book.title AS Title, COUNT(*) AS Authors FROM Book JOIN Book_author ON Book.isbn = Book_author.isbn GROUP BY Book.title;

Example output might resemble the following:


Title ---------------------SQL Examples and Guide The Joy of SQL An Introduction to SQL Pitfalls of SQL Authors ------4 1 2 1

Under the precondition that isbn is the only common column name of the two tables and that a column named title only exists in the Books table, the above query could be rewritten in the following form:
SELECT title, COUNT(*) AS Authors FROM Book NATURAL JOIN Book_author GROUP BY title;

However, many vendors either do not support this approach, or require certain column naming conventions in order for natural joins to work effectively. SQL includes operators and functions for calculating values on stored values. SQL allows the use of expressions in the select list to project data, as in the following example which returns a list of books that cost more than 100.00 with an additional sales_tax column containing a sales tax figure calculated at 6% of the price.
SELECT isbn, title, price, price * 0.06 AS sales_tax FROM Book WHERE price > 100.00 ORDER BY title;

Subqueries Queries can be nested so that the results of one query can be used in another query via a relational operator or aggregation function. A nested query is also known as a subquery. While joins and other table operations provide computationally superior (i.e. faster) alternatives in many cases, the use of subqueries introduces a hierarchy in execution which can be useful or necessary. In the following example, the aggregation function AVG receives as input the result of a subquery:
SELECT isbn, title, price FROM Book WHERE price < (SELECT AVG(price) FROM Book) ORDER BY title;

Since 1999 the SQL standard allows named subqueries called common table expression (named and designed after the IBM DB2 version 2 implementation; Oracle calls these subquery

factoring). CTEs can be also be recursive by referring to themselves; the resulting mechanism allows tree or graph traversals (when represented as relations), and more generally fixpoint computations. Null and three-valued logic (3VL) Main article: Null (SQL) The concept of Null was introduced into SQL to handle missing information in the relational model. The word NULL is a reserved keyword in SQL, used to identify the Null special marker. Comparisons with Null, for instance equality (=) in WHERE clauses, results in an Unknown truth value. In SELECT statements SQL returns only results for which the WHERE clause returns a value of True; i.e. it excludes results with values of False and also excludes those whose value is Unknown. Along with True and False, the Unknown resulting from direct comparisons with Null thus brings a fragment of three-valued logic to SQL. The truth tables SQL uses for AND, OR, and NOT correspond to a common fragment of the Kleene and Lukasiewicz three-valued logic (which differ in their definition of implication, however SQL defines no such operation).[15] p p p OR q True False Unknown True False Unknown False Unknown True True True True True True False False Unknown q False False q False True False Unknown Unknown False Unknown Unknown True Unknown Unknown p AND q q NOT q p p=q True False True False Unknown False Unknown False True True True True Unknown Unknown Unknown q False False Unknown Unknown Unknown Unknown There are however disputes about the semantic interpretation of Nulls in SQL because of its treatment outside direct comparisons. As seen in the table above direct equality comparisons between two NULLs in SQL (e.g. NULL = NULL) returns a truth value of Unknown. This is in line with the interpretation that Null does not have a value (and is not a member of any data domain) but is rather a placeholder or "mark" for missing information. However, the principle that two Nulls aren't equal to each other is effectively violated in the SQL specification for the [16] UNION and INTERSECT operators, which do identify nulls with each other. Consequently, these set operations in SQL, may produce results not representing sure information, unlike operations involving explicit comparisons with NULL (e.g. those in a WHERE clause discussed above). In Codd's 1979 proposal (which was basically adopted by SQL92) this semantic inconsistency is rationalized by arguing that removal of duplicates in set operations happens "at a lower level of detail than equality testing in the evaluation of retrieval operations."[15] However, computer

science professor Ron van der Meyden concluded that "The inconsistencies in the SQL standard mean that it is not possible to ascribe any intuitive logical semantics to the treatment of nulls in SQL."[16] Additionally, since SQL operators return Unknown when comparing anything with Null directly, SQL provides two Null-specific comparison predicates: IS NULL and IS NOT NULL test whether data is or is not Null.[17] Universal quantification is not explicitly supported by SQL, and must be worked out as a negated existential quantification.[18][19][20] There is also the "<row value expression> IS DISTINCT FROM <row value expression>" infixed comparison operator which returns TRUE unless both operands are equal or both are NULL. Likewise, IS NOT DISTINCT FROM is defined as "NOT (<row value expression> IS DISTINCT FROM <row value expression>)". SQL:1999 also introduced BOOLEAN type variables, which according to the standard can also hold Unknown values. In practice, a number of systems (e.g. PostgreSQL) implement the BOOLEAN Unknown as a BOOLEAN NULL.

Data manipulation
The Data Manipulation Language (DML) is the subset of SQL used to add, update and delete data:
INSERT

adds rows (formally tuples) to an existing table, e.g.:

INSERT INTO My_table (field1, field2, field3) VALUES ('test', 'N', NULL); UPDATE

modifies a set of existing table rows, e.g.:

UPDATE My_table SET field1 = 'updated value' WHERE field2 = 'N'; DELETE

removes existing rows from a table, e.g.:

DELETE FROM My_table WHERE field2 = 'N'; MERGE

is used to combine the data of multiple tables. It combines the INSERT and UPDATE elements. It is defined in the SQL:2003 standard; prior to that, some databases provided similar functionality via different syntax, sometimes called "upsert".

MERGE INTO TABLE_NAME USING table_reference ON (condition) WHEN MATCHED THEN UPDATE SET column1 = value1 [, column2 = value2 ...] WHEN NOT MATCHED THEN INSERT (column1 [, column2 ...]) VALUES (value1 [, value2 ...

Transaction controls
Transactions, if available, wrap DML operations:
START TRANSACTION

(or BEGIN WORK, or BEGIN TRANSACTION, depending on SQL dialect) marks the start of a database transaction, which either completes entirely or not at all. SAVE TRANSACTION (or SAVEPOINT) saves the state of the database at the current point in transaction

CREATE TABLE tbl_1(id INT); INSERT INTO tbl_1(id) VALUES(1); INSERT INTO tbl_1(id) VALUES(2); COMMIT; UPDATE tbl_1 SET id=200 WHERE id=1; SAVEPOINT id_1upd; UPDATE tbl_1 SET id=1000 WHERE id=2; ROLLBACK TO id_1upd; SELECT id FROM tbl_1; 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,

leaving the state of the data as it was prior to those changes. Once the COMMIT statement completes, the transaction's changes cannot be rolled back.
COMMIT and ROLLBACK terminate the current transaction and release data locks. In the absence of a START TRANSACTION or similar statement, the semantics of SQL are implementation-

dependent. The following example shows a classic transfer of funds transaction, where money is removed from one account and added to another. If either the removal or the addition fails, the entire transaction is rolled back.
START TRANSACTION; UPDATE Account SET amount=amount-200 WHERE account_number=1234; UPDATE Account SET amount=amount+200 WHERE account_number=2345; IF ERRORS=0 COMMIT; IF ERRORS<>0 ROLLBACK;

Data definition
The Data Definition Language (DDL) manages table and index structure. The most basic items of DDL are the CREATE, ALTER, RENAME, DROP and TRUNCATE statements:
CREATE

creates an object (a table, for example) in the database, e.g.:

CREATE TABLE My_table( my_field1 INT, my_field2 VARCHAR(50),

my_field3 DATE NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (my_field1, my_field2) ); ALTER

modifies the structure of an existing object in various ways, for example, adding a column to an existing table or a constraint, e.g.:

ALTER TABLE My_table ADD my_field4 NUMBER(3) NOT NULL; TRUNCATE

deletes all data from a table in a very fast way, deleting the data inside the table and not the table itself. It usually implies a subsequent COMMIT operation, i.e., it cannot be rolled back (data is not written to the logs for rollback later, unlike DELETE).

TRUNCATE TABLE My_table; DROP

deletes an object in the database, usually irretrievably, i.e., it cannot be rolled back,

e.g.:
DROP TABLE My_table;

Data types
Each column in an SQL table declares the type(s) that column may contain. ANSI SQL includes the following data types.[21] Character strings
CHARACTER(n) or CHAR(n): fixed-width n-character string, padded with spaces as needed CHARACTER VARYING(n) or VARCHAR(n): variable-width string with a maximum size of n

characters
NATIONAL CHARACTER(n)

or NCHAR(n): fixed width string supporting an international or NVARCHAR(n): variable-width NCHAR string

character set
NATIONAL CHARACTER VARYING(n)

Bit strings
BIT(n): an array of n bits BIT VARYING(n): an array of

up to n bits

Numbers
INTEGER and SMALLINT FLOAT, REAL and DOUBLE PRECISION NUMERIC(precision, scale) or DECIMAL(precision, scale)

For example, the number 123.45 has a precision of 5 and a scale of 2. The precision is a positive integer that determines the number of significant digits in a particular radix (binary or decimal).

The scale is a non-negative integer. A scale of 0 indicates that the number is an integer. For a decimal number with scale S, the exact numeric value is the integer value of the significant digits divided by 10S. SQL provides a function to round numerics or dates, called TRUNC (in Informix, DB2, PostgreSQL, Oracle and MySQL) or ROUND (in Informix, SQLite, Sybase, Oracle, PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Server)[22] Date and time
DATE: TIME:

for date values (e.g. 2011-05-03) for time values (e.g. 15:51:36). The granularity of the time value is usually a tick (100 nanoseconds). TIME WITH TIME ZONE or TIMETZ: the same as TIME, but including details about the time zone in question. TIMESTAMP: This is a DATE and a TIME put together in one variable (e.g. 2011-05-03 15:51:36). TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE or TIMESTAMPTZ: the same as TIMESTAMP, but including details about the time zone in question.

SQL provides several functions for generating a date / time variable out of a date / time string (TO_DATE, TO_TIME, TO_TIMESTAMP), as well as for extracting the respective members (seconds, for instance) of such variables. The current system date / time of the database server can be called by using functions like NOW.

Data control
The Data Control Language (DCL) authorizes users to access and manipulate data. Its two main statements are:
GRANT

authorizes one or more users to perform an operation or a set of operations on an eliminates a grant, which may be the default grant.

object.
REVOKE

Example:
GRANT SELECT, UPDATE ON My_table TO some_user, another_user; REVOKE SELECT, UPDATE ON My_table FROM some_user, another_user;

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