What is SQL? SQL stands for Structured Query Language and is
lingua franca in
database world. SQL is a standard that is used by all database vendors and programmers to define, extract and access
information that is stored in databases.
SQL began life as an IBM creation but was standardized by
American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and
International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as ANSI/ISO SQL in 1988. Since then ANSI/ISO SQL standard continued to
evolve. The ANSI-SQL group has since published three standards over
years: 1. SQL89 (SQL1) 2. SQL92 (SQL2) 3. SQL99 (SQL3)
SQL is a query language. It is English-like and easy to use. However, although there are more than 90 SQL reserved words,
most programmers seldom use more than
following handful of commands - SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, FROM, WHERE,
HAVING, BETWEEN, LIKE, OR, AND, NOT, IN, ORDER, GROUP and BY.
For example, if you had a database table named "employees" and you wanted to retrieve all records where
employee has
last name "goodman", you would use
following SQL statement: SELECT * FROM employees WHERE lastname = 'goodman';
There are many different categories of SQL statements but
basic ones which all programmers should be familiar with are
the SQL statements that: 1. Create tables and manipulate their definitions 2. Query
table data 3. Manipulate
table data