Stairway to SQL Dialects Level 1: Overview

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Stairway to SQL Dialects Level 1: Overview

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CELKO

Posted Thursday, May 10, 2012 8:43 AM

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Comments posted to this topic are about the item Stairway to SQL Dialects Level 1: Overview

Books in Celko Series for Morgan-Kaufmann Publishing
Analytics and OLAP in SQL
Data and Databases: Concepts in Practice
Data, Measurements and Standards in SQL
SQL for Smarties
SQL Programming Style
SQL Puzzles and Answers
Thinking in Sets
Trees and Hierarchies in SQL

Post #1297933

sknox

Posted Thursday, May 10, 2012 9:13 AM

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Good article. One point, though:

To use another Transact SQL example, CONVERT() with non-temporal data types can be changed to CAST(). But CONVERT() is an overloaded function that has an optional third parameter when it casts temporal data to display strings.

The third CONVERT() parameter is not limited to temporal data. It can also be used to change the way numeric data are converted to strings. Ignoring that when porting numeric conversions could break your code.

Post #1297957

RichB

Posted Wednesday, October 31, 2012 5:57 AM

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Great, informative and interesting, thanks very much.

But...

and keep release n+1 code running on release n software.

Perhaps I am not warmed up yet, but shouldn't that read n-1?

Post #1379264

Elliott Berkihiser

Posted Wednesday, October 31, 2012 10:59 AM

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Joe, thanks. Interesting article and good incentive to improve my coding.

Elliott

Post #1379446

hakim.ali

Posted Wednesday, October 31, 2012 12:23 PM

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Your real worry is Cowboy Coder Tony, who writes proprietary code. His dialect is so strong he codes like a hillbilly. He might do this to ensure job security; the more obscure his code, the safer he feels.

So true! Sad, but true.

Hakim Ali
www.sqlzen.com

Post #1379482

Eric M Russell

Posted Thursday, November 15, 2012 8:10 AM

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This is not an issue SQL language syntax, but as you're writing this series, it may be worth mentioning that the value NULL functions differently across RDMS platforms. For example, Oracle treats '' (a character value with zero length) as equivalent to NULL, which is not the case for SQL Server (and does this conform to the ANSI NULL standard?). Thus when porting SQL between platforms, the same SQL using the same dataset can produce a different resultset.

"Wise people understand the 10,000 things without going to each one.
They know them without having to look at each one,
and they transform all without acting on each one." - The Tao Te Ching: Verse 47

Post #1385184

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