Re: Efficiency; advanced/future SQL constructs

> > There are some operations that are so obvious and frequent that I'm amazed
> > that they didn't show up in SQL, and that I haven't read anything about
 any
> > planned updates to the standards that might incorporate them. Actually,
>
> The fact that seven fundamental statements (SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE,
> CREATE, ALTER, and
> DROP) cover thousands upon thousands of distinct application situations is
> neither an accident nor an oversight.

Even still, I think that a table assignment operation is sufficiently obvious and sufficiently useful that I find it's absence remarkable. Harlan's stated problem then resolves to assigning a UNION query to an existing table.

Given the complexities in the syntax for CREATE, ALTER and DROP, I don't really consider them three statements. I consider CREATE TABLE a different statement than CREATE INDEX, for instance; otherwise, I note that we could get rid of CREATE and DROP by making them subclauses of a single ALTER DATABASE statement. Received on Wed Aug 22 2001 - 07:54:22 CDT