First, you need to learn the basic terms. Rows are not records. Rows can have constraints,  can be virtual, etc. while a record is a physical unit of storage. Fields...

>> just started reading about the EXISTS() operator. I have two examples. In both examples, I have a sub SELECT with a WHERE clause. In the first example, at the...

• This reply was modified 5 years, 4 months ago by Steve Jones - SSC Editor. Reason: code formatting

http://www2.cs.arizona.edu/~rts/publications.html

He has other good papers posted there, but they are not of immediate interest.

Your suggestion of using 9999-01-01 as a dummy date/place marker for eternity is a kludge on top...

I strongly disagree with Jeff. If you want a good discussion of representing temporal values in SQL, download the paper by Rick Snodgrass at the University of Arizona, as a...

>> So a 2D piece of physical capital is the best analogy you could come up with? <<

I I've been taking SQL for many decades, this literally was the best...

No, it is not a Ferrari. It is a database engine aimed at a particular market niche. It does it very nicely in many ways, but it is not something...

>> Backups are proprietary so no need for that, right? What about log files? Those are proprietary so no need to ship those anywhere, right? Should Oracle users consider not...

>> Using something proprietary may be a part of the reason why you bought the software with the proprietary feature. <<

I agree about picking your software and hardware for particular...

>> In 99.9% of all cases, all most people need is an automatically assigned value incremented by 1. <<

No, I would say that in the majority of cases people need...

When you set something to zero like this, you're changing the data,you're destroying the fact which Chris Date and I think most other RDBMS experts feel is a really bad.

I'm...

I am trying to do a self-referencing cross join, i think not sure what else to call it from one table. For each value  get the next attribute/value by policy....

I don't understand what a sequence has to do with an identity property. They are two very different things. Just look at all the optional clauses that you get with...

The SEQUENCE and IDENTITY are two very different things. The IDENTITY table property is a very proprietary, totally non-relational, feature in SQL Server. By analogy, it is like the parking...

You need to get a book on basic relational databases. Look up normalization and in particular, pay attention to second and third normal forms.

You also need to pay attention to...

What is the "party model"?  Can you give me an example, using personnel in a generic organization?