STRUCTURED QUERY LANGUAGE (SQL) is the language of the database. It's a stan dard that defines how to manipulate almost every aspect of database, from creating the database and tables themselves to creating, reading, inserting, updating, and deleting data in the database. This standard is then implemented and extended differently by each database system vendor. The current version of the SQL standard is SQL-99. Most major database platforms now adhere fairly closely to this standard with a couple of exceptions. Microsoft Access, for example, has only recently (with Access XP) adopted the SQL-92 standard. Previous editions of Access supported only SQL-89. In this book, we'll walk through all the major SQL statements you're likely to need when programming databases. We'll highlight differences between the standard and implementations used in five major database systems: • SQLServer • Oracle • DB2 • MySQL • Access Who Is This Book For? This book is designed to meet the needs of both the novice SQL programmer who needs a bit of syntactical help and the developer using SQL day to day who needs a handy desktop SQL reference. You don't need to have done much data base programming before, but some experience with databases will be useful. You should also have one of the five database systems mentioned earlier to gain the most benefits from this book.
