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An ORDER BY clause in SQL specifies that a SQL SELECT statement returns a result set with the rows being sorted by the values of one or more columns. The sort criteria does not have to be included in the result set (restrictions apply for SELECT DISTINCT, GROUP BY, UNION [DISTINCT], EXCEPT [DISTINCT] and INTERSECT [DISTINCT].)
Predicates, which specify conditions that can be evaluated to SQL three-valued logic (3VL) (true/false/unknown) or Boolean truth values and are used to limit the effects of statements and queries, or to change program flow. Queries, which retrieve the data based on specific criteria. This is an important element of SQL.
In addition to basic equality and inequality conditions, SQL allows for more complex conditional logic through constructs such as CASE, COALESCE, and NULLIF.The CASE expression, for example, enables SQL to perform conditional branching within queries, providing a mechanism to return different values based on evaluated conditions.
The performance of a query plan is determined largely by the order in which the tables are joined. For example, when joining 3 tables A, B, C of size 10 rows, 10,000 rows, and 1,000,000 rows, respectively, a query plan that joins B and C first can take several orders-of-magnitude more time to execute than one that joins A and C first.
ISO/IEC 9075 "Information technology - Database languages - SQL" is an international standard for Structured Query Language, and is considered as specifying the minimum for what a database engine should fulfill in terms of SQL syntax, which is called Core SQL. The standard also defines a number of optional features.
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SQL was initially developed at IBM by Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce after learning about the relational model from Edgar F. Codd [12] in the early 1970s. [13] This version, initially called SEQUEL (Structured English Query Language), was designed to manipulate and retrieve data stored in IBM's original quasirelational database management system, System R, which a group at IBM San ...
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 than 100.00.