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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 ...
A relation is in first normal form if and only if no attribute domain has relations as elements. [1] Or more informally, that no table column can have tables as values. Database normalization is the process of representing a database in terms of relations in standard normal forms, where first normal is a minimal requirement.
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]).
Each column in an SQL table declares the type(s) that column may contain. ANSI SQL includes the following data types. [14] Character strings and national character strings. CHARACTER(n) (or CHAR(n)): fixed-width n-character string, padded with spaces as needed; CHARACTER VARYING(n) (or VARCHAR(n)): variable-width string with a maximum size of n ...
In SQL, the unique keys have a UNIQUE constraint assigned to them in order to prevent duplicates (a duplicate entry is not valid in a unique column). Alternate keys may be used like the primary key when doing a single-table select or when filtering in a where clause, but are not typically used to join multiple tables.
A database refactoring is a simple change to a database schema that improves its design while retaining both its behavioral and informational semantics. Database refactoring does not change the way data is interpreted or used and does not fix bugs or add new functionality.
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.