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