How This Book Is Organized

     

SQL in a Nutshell , Second Edition, is divided into five chapters and two appendixes:

Chapter 1, SQL History and Implementations

Discusses the Relational Database Model, describes the current and previous SQL standards, and introduces the SQL implementations covered in this book.

Chapter 2, Foundational Concepts

Describes the fundamental concepts necessary for understanding relational databases and SQL commands.

Chapter 3, SQL Statement Command Reference

Provides an alphabetical command reference to SQL statements. It details the latest ANSI standard, SQL2003, for each command, as well as the implementation of each command by DB2, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server.

Chapter 4, SQL Functions

Provides an alphabetical reference of the SQL2003 functions, describing vendor implementations of all SQL2003 functions. In addition, Chapter 4 includes coverage for all platform-specific functions that are unique to each implementation.

Chapter 5, Database Programming

Provides an overview of database programming from a variety of connectivity methods . ADO.NET and JDBC are discussed, among other topics.

Appendix A, Sybase Adaptive Server

Sybase's Adaptive Server product and Microsoft SQL Server share a common heritage. As a result, most of the SQL Server commands detailed in Chapter 3, and most of the functions detailed in Chapter 4, will work with Sybase. However, "most" is the operative word, and we provide this appendix to show where Sybase differs from SQL Server.

Appendix B, Shared and Platform-Specific Keywords

Provides a table of keywords declared in SQL2003 and by the different database platforms. You can use this table to look for words that you should not use for object or variable names .