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A surrogate key is frequently a sequential number (e.g. a Sybase or SQL Server "identity column", a PostgreSQL or Informix serial, an Oracle or SQL Server SEQUENCE or a column defined with AUTO_INCREMENT in MySQL). Some databases provide UUID/GUID as a possible data type for surrogate keys (e.g. PostgreSQL UUID [3] or SQL Server ...
In situations where the number of unique values of a column is far less than the number of rows in the table, column-oriented storage allow significant savings in space through data compression. Columnar storage also allows fast execution of range queries (e.g., show all records where a particular column is between X and Y, or less than X.)
A table (called the referencing table) can refer to a column (or a group of columns) in another table (the referenced table) by using a foreign key. The referenced column(s) in the referenced table must be under a unique constraint, such as a primary key. Also, self-references are possible (not fully implemented in MS SQL Server though [5]).
In SQL the UNION clause combines the results of two SQL queries into a single table of all matching rows. The two queries must result in the same number of columns and compatible data types in order to unite. Any duplicate records are automatically removed unless UNION ALL is used.
A query includes a list of columns to include in the final result, normally immediately following the SELECT keyword. An asterisk ("*") can be used to specify that the query should return all columns of the queried tables. SELECT is the most complex statement in SQL, with optional keywords and clauses that include:
Major DBMSs, including SQLite, [5] MySQL, [6] Oracle, [7] IBM Db2, [8] Microsoft SQL Server [9] and PostgreSQL [10] support prepared statements. Prepared statements are normally executed through a non-SQL binary protocol for efficiency and protection from SQL injection, but with some DBMSs such as MySQL prepared statements are also available using a SQL syntax for debugging purposes.
Additionally there is a single-row version, UPDATE OR INSERT INTO tablename (columns) VALUES (values) [MATCHING (columns)], but the latter does not give you the option to take different actions on insert versus update (e.g. setting a new sequence value only for new rows, not for existing ones.)
Without an ORDER BY clause, the order of rows returned by an SQL query is undefined. The DISTINCT keyword [5] eliminates duplicate data. [6] The following example of a SELECT query returns a list of expensive books. The query retrieves all rows from the Book table in which the price column contains a value greater