I'd rather play golf

As I mentioned in September, the latest version of the ISO SQL Standard had been in the final draft (FDIS) stage through the autumn, and yesterday, 15 December, SQL:2011 became the official version of the SQL standard and is now available for purchase on the ISO website. The SQL:2011 standard is not yet available from [...]

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The next version of the ISO SQL Standard, SQL/2011, is due to go to FDIS (Final Draft International Standard) ballot for approval by ISO member countries in the next month or so. The international committee that manages the SQL standard’s development is ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 32 Data Management and Interchange/WG 3 – Database Languages. In [...]

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In February I introduced the Seven Deadly Sins of Database Application Performance. Our first deadly sin concerns physical database design, which includes schema design issues, table column order, indexing, and choice of database page size, to name but a few important factors, that can adversely impact performance. In this article, I want to explore a [...]

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Each new SQL Anywhere release brings additional SQL functionality, some resulting from enhancements to the SQL standard, and some resulting from our own innovations to the product. In the forthcoming Version 12, for instance, SQL Anywhere will support the “distinct predicate” from the SQL/2008 standard that has the syntax X IS [ NOT ] DISTINCT [...]

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In November 1995 we launched the first version of SQL Anywhere (version 5.0) that offered support for Transact-SQL, in addition to SQL Anywhere’s existing dialect, which we continue to call Watcom SQL. (By the way, SQL Anywhere 5.0 was my first SQL Anywhere release, as I had joined the firm just a month earlier). There [...]

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In a previous article, I presented some examples of how one can SELECT rows from a dml-derived-table, a new SQL language feature of the SQL Anywhere 12 server, now in beta. In this post, I want to briefly describe some other ways in which one can exploit dml-derived-tables to simplify applications. The first thing to [...]

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In a previous post in May 2009 I expressed admiration for a SQL language feature in IBM’s DB2 product that permits one to use an update DML statement as a table expression in a query’s FROM clause. Here is a simple example to illustrate DB2′s syntax: 1 2 3 SELECT T_updated.* FROM NEW TABLE ( [...]

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After posting my recent article on the use of the RowGenerator system table, I received a welcome email from Jan-Eike Michels of IBM who, like me, sits on the DM32.2 committee for INCITS as the IBM representative for the SQL Standard: Hi Glenn, Just stumbled across your blog about the RowGenerator (http://iablog.sybase.com/paulley/2009/09/using-rowgenerator/) . I don’t [...]

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In SQL Anywhere, server, database, and connection-level options provide application control of various behaviours that can affect server operation and/or application-visible semantics. “Options” as implemented in SQL Anywhere are not part of the ISO SQL Standard, though the concept of support for “global variables” has been discussed within the SQL standards process. SQL Anywhere options [...]

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At June’s 2009 ACM SIGMOD Conference, Surajit Chaudhuri of Microsoft Research presented a thought-provoking paper [1] entitled “Query Optimizers: Time to Rethink the Contract?”. Here is the abstract: Query Optimization is expected to produce good execution plans for complex queries while taking relatively small optimization time. Moreover, it is expected to pick the execution plans [...]

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