SQL Test Suite goes online
Joan M. Sullivan · Computer · 1997
Does your relational database speak SQL fluently? It's easy to find out, because the SQL (Structured Query Language) Test Suite is now free on the Web. SQL is the standard that lets DBMS products from different vendors interoperate. It defines common data structures (tables, columns, views, and so on) and provides a data manipulation language to populate, update, and query those structures. Accessing structured data with SQL is quite different from searching the full text of documents on the Web. Structured data in the relational model means data that can be represented in tables. Each row represents a different item, and the columns represent various attributes of the item. Columns have names and integrity constraints that specify valid values. Because the column values are named and represented in a consistent format, you can select rows precisely, on the basis of their contents. This is especially helpful in dealing with numeric data. You can also join data from different tables on the basis of matching column values. It is possible to do useful types of analysis too, listing items that are in one table and are missing, present, or have specific attributes in a related table. You can extract from a large table precisely those rows of interest, regroup them, and generate simple statistics on them.