CHAPTER 6 Coding Choices
“Caesar: Pardon him, Theodotus. He is a barbarian and thinks the customsof his tribe and island are the laws of nature.”
—Caesar and Cleopatra, by George Bernard Shaw, 1898
THIS CHAPTER DEALS WITH writing good DML statements in Standard SQL. That means they are portable and can be optimized well by most SQL dialects. I define portable to mean one of several things. The code is standard and can be run as-is on other SQL dialects; standard implies portable. Or the code can be converted to another SQL dialect in a simple mechanical fashion, or that the feature used is so universal that all or most products have it in some form; portable does not imply standard. You can get some help with this concept from the X/Open SQL ...
Get Joe Celko's SQL Programming Style now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
