SQL in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

What’s New in SQL2003

SQL99 had two main parts, Foundation:1999 and Bindings:1999. The SQL2003 Foundation section includes all of the Foundation and Bindings standards from SQL99, but a new section called Schemata was created.

The Core requirements of SQL2003 did not change from Core SQL99. So the database platforms that conformed to Core SQL99 automatically conform to SQL2003. Although the Core of SQL2003 has no additions (except for a few new reserved words), a number of individual statements and behaviors have been updated or modified. Because these updates are reflected in the individual syntax descriptions of each statement in Chapter 3, we won’t spend time on them here.

A few elements of the Core in SQL99 have been deleted from SQL2003, including:

• The BIT and BIT VARYING datatypes

• The UNION JOIN clause

• The UPDATE...SET ROW statement

In addition, a number of features, most of which were rather obscure, have been added, deleted, or renamed. At this point in time, many of the new features of SQL2003 standard are interesting mostly from an academic standpoint because none of the database platforms support the feature yet. However, there are a few new features that hold more than passing interest:

Elementary OLAP functions

Adds an Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) amendment, including a number of windowing functions to support widely used calculations such as moving averages and cumulative sums. Windowing functions are aggregates computed over a window of data: ROW_NUMBER, RANK,