The following are included in the PostgreSQL distribution in the postscript, HTML formats and unix man-pages. They are located in /usr/doc/postgresql* directory. If you have access to internet, you can find the documents listed below at http://www.postgresql.org/docs
Is a a part of PSQL command
There is a script in the /tools directory in source code tree.
Use the command psql \h
Look at the regression tests at src/test. There you can find the directories
regress/sql and suite/*.sql and also see <ref id="Examples RPM">
SQL tutorial scripts is in the directory src/tutorial
Morgan Kaufman Publisher is one of best SQL books. This deals with SQL92.
Addison-Wesley Publishing company is also a good book. Very popular book for SQL.
Stephen Cannan and Gerard Otten
McGraw-Hill Book Company Europe , Berkshire, SL6 2QL, England
Martin Gruber, Technical Editor: Joe Celko
SYBEX Inc. 2021 Challenger Drive Alameda, CA 94501
This book is the Bible of Database Management Systems.
The book details normalization, SQL, recovery, concurrency, security,
integrity, and extensions to the original relational model, current issues
like client/server systems and the Object Oriented model(s). Many
references are included for further reading. Recommended for most users.
Book details theory of relational databases, relational algebra, calculus
and normalisation. But it does not cover real world issues and examples
beyond simple examples. Recommended for most users.
Recommended for most users.
This book is a collection of papers that have been published over the
years on databases. It's not for the casual user but it is really a
reference for advanced (post-graduate) students or database system
developers.
This book is a collection of papers that have been published over the
years on databases. It's not for the casual user but it is really a
reference for advanced (post-graduate) students or database system
developers.
This book goes into the details of access methods, storage techniques.
It's not for the casual user but it is for advanced (post-graduate)
students or database system developers.
Wrox Press Ltd.
Unit 16, 20 James Road, Tyseley
Birmingham, B11 2BA, England
1995
Technology
QED and John Wiley
1991
Presents the requirements of building client/server database
applications via repository metamodels and the use of ANSI standard SQL
1993
Hundreds of other titles on SQL are available! Check out a bookstore.
ANSI/ISO SQL specifications documents can be found at these sites listed below -
See Appendix A of this document Appendix A
The SQL 1998 (SQL 3) specification is still under development. See 'Electronic Access to the SQL3 Working Draft' of this document at SQL 1998
See Appendix B of this document Appendix B
This directory contains the language specification for a temporal extension to the SQL-92 language standard. This new language is designated TSQL2.
The language specification present here is the final version of the language.
Correspondence may be directed to the chair of the TSQL2 Language Design Committee, Richard T.Snodgrass, Department of Computer Science, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721,
The affiliations and e-mail addresses of the TSQL2 Language Design Committee members may be found in a separate section at the end of the language specification.The contents of this directory are as follows.
spec.dvi,.ps TSQL2 Language Specification, published in September, 1994
bookspec.ps TSQL2 Language Specification, as it appears in the TSQL2 book, published in September, 1995 (see below).
sql3 change proposals submitted to the ANSI and ISO SQL3 committees.
Associated with the language specification is a collection of commentaries which discuss design decisions, provide examples, and consider how the language may be implemented. These commentaries were originally proposals to the TSQL2 Language Design Committee. They now serve a different purpose: to provide examples of the constructs, motivate the many decisions made during the language design, and compare TSQL2 with the many other language proposals that have been made over the last fifteen years. It should be emphasized that these commentaries are not part of the TSQL2 language specification per se, but rather supplement and elaborate upon it. The language specification proper is the final word on TSQL2.
The commentaries, along with the language specification, several indexes, and other supporting material, has been published as a book:
Snodgrass, R.T., editor, The TSQL2 Temporal Query Language, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995, 674+xxiv pages.
The evaluation commentary appears in the book in an abbreviated form; the full commentary is provided in this directory as file eval.ps
The file tl2tsql2.pl is a prolog program that tranlates allowed temporal logic to TSQL2. This program was written by Michael Boehlen
He may be contacted for a paper that describes this translation. This is a rather dated version of that program. Newer versions are available at (the TimeDB and Tiger systems).This document shows you how to (legally) acquire a copy of the SQL-92 standard and how to acquire a copy of the "current" SQL3 Working Draft.
The standard is copyrighted ANSI standard by ANSI, the ISO standard by ISO.
There are two (2) current SQL standards, an ANSI publication and an ISO publication. The two standards are word-for-word identical except for such trivial matters as the title of the document, page headers, the phrase "International Standard" vs "American Standard", and so forth.
Buying the SQL-92 Standard
The ISO standard, ISO/IEC 9075:1992, Information Technology - Database Languages - SQL, is currently (March, 1993) available and in stock from ANSI at:
American National Standards Institute
1430 Broadway
New York, NY 10018 (USA)
Phone (sales): +1.212.642.4900
If you purchase either document from ANSI, it will have a handling charge of 7% added to it (that is, about US$9.10). Overseas shipping charges will undoubtedly add still more cost. ANSI requires a hardcopy of a company purchase order to accompany all orders; alternately, you can send a check drawn on a US bank in US dollars, which they will cash and clear before shipping your order. (An exception exists: If your organization is a corporate member of ANSI, then ANSI will ship the documents and simply bill your company.)
The ISO standard is also available outside the United States from local national bodies (country standardization bodies) that are members of either ISO (International Organization for Standardization) or IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission). Copies of the list of national bodies and their addresses are available from ANSI or from other national bodies. They are also available from ISO:
International Organization for Standardization
Central Secretariat
1, rue de Varembi
CH-1211 Genhve 20
Switzerland
Global Engineering Documents
2805 McGaw Ave
Irvine, CA 92714 (USA)
USA
Phone (works from anywhere): +1.714.261.1455
Phone (only in the USA): (800)854-7179
Buying a copy of the SQL3 Working Draft
You can purchase a hardcopy of the SQL3 working draft from the ANSI X3 Secretariat, CBEMA (Computer and Business Equipment Manufacturers Association). They intend to keep the "most recent" versions of the SQL3 working draft available and sell them for about US$60.00 to US$65.00. You can contact CBEMA at:
CBEMA, X3 Secretariat
Attn: Lynn Barra
1250 Eye St.
Suite 200
Washington, DC 20005 (USA)
Electronic Access to the SQL3 Working Draft
The most recent version (as of the date of this writing) of the SQL3 (both ANSI and ISO) working draft (and all of its Parts) is available by "anonymous ftp" or by "ftpmail" on:
gatekeeper.dec.com
at
/pub/standards/sql/
In general, you can find files with names like:
sql-bindings-mar94.ps
sql-bindings-mar94.txt
sql-cli-mar94.ps
sql-cli-mar94.txt
sql-foundation-mar94.ps
sql-foundation-mar94.txt
sql-framework-mar94.ps
sql-framework-mar94.txt
sql-psm-mar94.ps
sql-psm-mar94.txt
In addition, for those readers unable to get a directory listing by FTP, we have placed a file with the name:
ls
Retrieving Files Directly Using ftp
This is a sample of how to use FTP. Specifically, it shows how to connect to gatekeeper.dec.com, get to the directory where the base document is kept, and transfer the document to your host. Note that your host must have Internet access to do this. The login is 'ftp' and the password is your email address (this is sometimes referred to as 'anonymous ftp'). The command 'type binary' is used to ensure that no bits are stripped from the file(s) received. 'get' gets one file at a time. Comments in the script below are inside angle brackets < like so > .
% ftp gatekeeper.dec.com
Connected to gatekeeper.dec.com.
220- *** /etc/motd.ftp ***
Gatekeeper.DEC.COM is an unsupported service of DEC Corporate Research.
<...this goes on for a while...>
220 gatekeeper.dec.com FTP server (Version 5.83 Sat ... 1992) ready.
Name (gatekeeper.dec.com:<yourlogin here>): ftp <anonymous also works>
331 Guest login ok, send ident as password.
Password: <enter your email address here >
230 Guest login ok, access restrictions apply.
Remote system type is UNIX. <or whatever>
Using binary mode to transfer files.
ftp> cd pub/standards/sql
250 CWD command successful.
ftp> dir
200 PORT command successful.
150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for /bin/ls.
total 9529
-r--r--r-- 1 root system 357782 Feb 25 10:18 x3h2-93-081.ps
-r--r--r-- 1 root system 158782 Feb 25 10:19 x3h2-93-081.txt
-r--r--r-- 1 root system 195202 Feb 25 10:20 x3h2-93-082.ps
-r--r--r-- 1 root system 90900 Feb 25 10:20 x3h2-93-082.txt
-r--r--r-- 1 root system 5856284 Feb 25 09:55 x3h2-93-091.ps
-r--r--r-- 1 root system 3043687 Feb 25 09:57 x3h2-93-091.txt
226 Transfer complete.
ftp> type binary
200 Type set to I.
ftp> get x3h2-93-082.txt
200 PORT command successful.
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for x3h2-93-082.txt (90900 bytes).
226 Transfer complete.
90900 bytes received in 0.53 seconds (166.11 Kbytes/s)
ftp> quit
% <the file is now in your directory as x3h2-93-082.txt>
Digital Equipment Corporation, like several other companies, provides ftp email service. The response can take several days, but it does provide a service equivalent to ftp for those without direct Internet ftp access. The address of the server is:
ftpmail@decwrl.dec.com
The following script will retrieve the PostScript for the latest version of the SQL3 document:
reply joe.programmer@imaginary-corp.com
connect gatekeeper.dec.com anonymous
binary
compress
reply joe.programmer@imaginary-corp.com
connect gatekeeper.dec.com anonymous
binary
compress
uuencode
chdir /pub/standards/sql
get x3h2-93-091.ps
quit
reply joe.programmer@imaginary-corp.com
connect gatekeeper.dec.com anonymous
chdir /pub/standards/sql
get x3h2-93-091.ps
quit
To retrieve any particular file, other than x3h2-93-091.ps, simply replace "x3h2-93-091.ps" with the name of the desired file. To get a directory listing of all files available, replace "get x3h2-93-091.ps" with "dir".
This chapter is a source of information about the SQL standards process and its current state.
Current Status:
Development is currently underway to enhance SQL into a computationally complete language for the definition and management of persistent, complex objects. This includes: generalization and specialization hierarchies, multiple inheritance, user defined data types, triggers and assertions, support for knowledge based systems, recursive query expressions, and additional data administration tools. It also includes the specification of abstract data types (ADTs), object identifiers, methods, inheritance, polymorphism, encapsulation, and all of the other facilities normally associated with object data management.
In the fall of 1996, several parts of SQL3 went through a ISO CD ballot. Those parts were SQL/Framework, SQL/Foundation, and SQL/Bindings. Those ballots failed (as expected) with 900 or so comments. In Late January, there was an ISO DBL editing meeting that processed a large number of problem solutions that were either included with ballot comments or submitted as separate papers. Since the DBL editing meeting was unable to process all of the comments, the editing meeting has been extended. The completion of the editing meeting is scheduled for the end of July, 1997, in London.
Following the July editing meeting, the expectation is that a Final CD ballot will be requested for these parts of SQL. The Final CD process will take about 6 months and a DBL editing meeting, after which there will be a DIS ballot and a fairly quick IS ballot.
The ISO procedures have changed since SQL/92, so the SQL committees are still working through the exact details of the process.
If everything goes well, these parts of SQL3 will become an official ISO/IEC standard in late 1998, but the schedule is very tight.
In 1993, the ANSI and ISO development committees decided to split future SQL development into a multi-part standard. The Parts are:
In the USA, the entirety of SQL3 is being processed as both an ANSI Domestic ("D") project and as an ISO project. The expected time frame for completion of SQL3 is currently 1999.
The SQL/CLI and SQL/PSM are being processed as fast as possible as addendums to SQL-92. In the USA, these are being processed only as International ("I") projects. SQL/CLI was completed in 1995. SQL/PSM should be completed sometime in late 1996.
In addition to the SQL3 work, a number of additional projects are being persued:
Standards Committee and Process
There are actually a number of SQL standards committees around the world. There is an international SQL standards group as a part of ISO. A number of countries have committees that focus on SQL. These countries (usually) send representatives to ISO/IEC JTC1/SC 21/WG3 DBL meetings. The countries that actively participate in the ISO SQL standards process are:
NIST Validation
SQL implementations are validated (in the Unites States) by the National Institute of Standards and Training (NIST). NIST currently has a validation test suite for entry level SQL-92. The exact details of the NIST validation requirements are defined as a Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS). The current requirements for SQL are defined in FIPS 127-2. The Postscript and Text versions of this document can be retrieved from NIST. The current SQL Validated Products List can also be retrieved from NIST.
Standard SQL Publications and Articles
There are two versions of the SQL standard. Both are available from ANSI:
The two versions of the SQL standard are identical except for the front matter and references to other standards. Both versions are available from:
American National Standards Institute
1430 Broadway
New York, NY 10018
USA
Phone (sales): +1.212.642.4900
* Technical Corrigendum 1:1994 to ISO/IEC 9075:1992
In addition to the standards, several books have been written about the 1992 SQL standard. These books provide a much more readable description of the standard than the actual standard.
Related Standards
A number of other standards are of interest to the SQL community. This section contains pointers to information on those efforts. These pointers will be augmented as additional information becomes available on the web.
A significant portion of the SQL3 effort is in the SQL Foundation document:
There are several prerequisites to the object oriented capabilities:
These capabilities are defined as a part of SQL/PSM
A great deal of work is currently being done to refine the SQL-3 object model and align it with the object model proposed by ODMG. This effort is described in the X3H2 and ISO DBL paper: Accomodating SQL3 and ODMG. A recent update on the SQL3/OQL Merger is also available.
SQL3 Timing
Work on SQL3 is well underway, but the final standards is several years away.
The ANSI version of the standard will be on a similar schedule.
The SQL/CLI is a programing call level interface to SQL databases. It is designed to support database access from shrink-wrapped applications. The CLI was originally created by a subcommittee of the SQL Access Group (SAG). The SAG/CLI specification was published as the Microsoft Open DataBase Connectivity (ODBC) specification in 1992. In 1993, SAG submitted the CLI to the ANSI and ISO SQL committees. (The SQL Access Group has now merged with X/Open consortium.)
SQL/CLI provides an international standard for:
SQL/CLI Timing
For the standards process, SQL/CLI is being processed with blinding speed.
SQL/PSM expands SQL by adding:
In addition to being a valuable application development tool, SQL/PSM provides the foundation support for the object oriented capabilities in SQL3.
Multi-statement and Stored Procedures
Multi-statement and stored procedures offer a variety of advantages in a client/server environment:
Procedural Language Extensions
Procedural language add the power of a traditional programming language to SQL through flow control statements and a variety of other programming constructs.
Flow Control Statements
The procedural language extensions include other programming language constructs:
In addition, all of the traditional SQL statements can be included in multi-statement procedures.
External Procedure and Function Calls
One feature frequently mentioned in the wish lists for many database products, and implemented in some, is a capability augmenting the built-in features with calls to user-written procedures external to the database software.
The benefit of this capability is that it gives the database (and therefore database applications) access to a rich set of procedures and functions too numerous to be defined by a standards committee.
SQL/PSM Timing
SQL/PSM is proceeding quickly:
For ease of reference, the programming language bindings have been pulled out into a separate document. The current version is simply an extract of the dynamic and embedded bindings from SQL-92.
A variety of issues remain unresolved for the programming language bindings.
For traditional programming language, mappings exist for the SQL-92 datatypes. However, mappings must be defined between SQL objects and programming language variables.
For object oriented languages, mapping must be defined for the current SQL datatypes and between the SQL object model and the object model of the object-oriented language.
The object model needs to stabilize before these can be addressed.
The language bindings will be completed as a part of SQL3.
This specification would standardize an application program interface (API) between a global Transaction Manager and an SQL Resource Manager. It would standardize the function calls, based upon the semantics of ISO/IEC 10026, "Distributed Transaction Processing", that an SQL Resource Manager would have to support for two-phase commit. The base document is derived from an X/Open publication, with X/Open permission, that specifies explicit input and output parameters and semantics, in terms of SQL data types, for the following functions: xa_close, xa_commit, xa_complete, xa_end, xa_forget, xa_open, xa_prepare, xa_recover, xa_rollback, and xa_start.
ISO is currently attempting to fast-track the X/Open XA specification. The fast-track process adopts a current industry specification with no changes. The XA fast-track ballot at the ISO SC21, JTC 1 level started on April 27, 1995 and ends on October 27, 1995. If the XA specification is approved by 75% of the votes, and by 2/3 of the p-members of JTC 1, it will become an International Standard. If the fast-track ballot is approved, SQL/XA could become a standard in 1996.
Temporal SQL deals with time-related data. The concept is that it is useful to query data to discover what it looked like at a particular point in time. Temporal SQL is a December, 1994 paper by Rick Snodgrass describing the concepts.
X3 Announces the Approval of a New Project, ISO/IEC 9075 Part 7: SQL/Temporal is a press release related to SQL/Temporal.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Temporal SQL
************
Rick Snodgrass (chair of the TSQL2 committee)
31-Dec-1994
Valid-time support goes beyond that of a temporal ADT. With the later, a column is specified as of a temporal domain, such as DATE or INTERVAL (examples will be given shortly). With valid time, the rows of a table vary over time, as reality changes. The timestamp associated with a row of a valid-time table is interpreted by the query language as the time when the combination of values of the columns in the row was valid. This implicit timestamp allows queries to be expressed succinctly and intuitively.
The University of Arizona's Office of Appointed Personnel has some information in a database, including each employee's name, their current salary, and their current title. This can be represented by a simple table.
Employee(Name, Salary, Title)
SELECT Salary
FROM Employee
WHERE Name = 'Bob'
Employee(Name, Salary, Title, DateofBirth DATE)
SELECT DateofBirth
FROM Employee
WHERE Name = 'Bob'
The OAP wishes to computerize the employment history. To do so, they append two columns, one indicating when the information in the row became valid, the other indicating when the information was no longer valid.
Employee (Name, Salary, Title, DateofBirth, Start DATE, Stop DATE)
To the data model, these new columns are identical to DateofBirth. However, their presence has wide-ranging consequences.
To find an employee's current salary, things are more difficult.
SELECT Salary
FROM Employee
WHERE Name = 'Bob' AND Start <= CURRENT_DATE AND CURRENT_DATE <= Stop
Name Salary Title DateofBirth Start Stop
---- ------ ----- ----------- ----- ----
Bob 60000 Assistant Provost 1945-04-09 1993-01-01 1993-05-30
Bob 70000 Assistant Provost 1945-04-09 1993-06-01 1993-09-30
Bob 70000 Provost 1945-04-09 1993-10-01 1994-01-31
Bob 70000 Professor 1945-04-09 1994-02-01 1994-12-31
Figure 1
Name Salary Start Stop
---- ------ ----- ----
Bob 60000 1993-01-01 1993-05-30
Bob 70000 1993-06-01 1994-12-31
CREATE TABLE Temp(Salary, Start, Stop)
AS SELECT Salary, Start, Stop
FROM Employee;
UPDATE Temp T1
SET (T1.Stop) = (SELECT MAX(T2.Stop)
FROM Temp AS T2
WHERE T1.Salary = T2.Salary AND T1.Start < T2.Start
AND T1.Stop >= T2.Start AND T1.Stop < T2.Stop)
WHERE EXISTS (SELECT *
FROM Temp AS T2
WHERE T1.Salary = T2.Salary AND T1.Start < T2.Start
AND T1.Stop >= T2.Start AND T1.Stop < T2.Stop)
until no rows updated;
DELETE FROM Temp T1
WHERE EXISTS (SELECT *
FROM Temp AS T2
WHERE T1.Salary = T2.Salary
AND ((T1.Start > T2.Start AND T1.Stop <= T2.Stop)
OR (T1.Start >= T2.Start AND T1.Stop < T2.Stop))
A third alternative is to use SQL only to open a cursor on the table. A linked list of periods is maintained, each with a salary. This linked list should be initialized to empty.
DECLARE emp_cursor CURSOR FOR
SELECT Salary, Title, Start, Stop
FROM Employee;
OPEN emp_cursor;
loop:
FETCH emp_cursor INTO :salary, :start, :stop;
if no-data returned then goto finished;
find position in linked list to insert this information;
goto loop;
finished:
CLOSE emp_cursor;
The linked list may not be necessary in this case if the cursor is ORDER BY Start.
In any case, the query, a natural one, is quite difficult to express using the facilities present in SQL-92. The query is trivial in TSQL2.
SELECT Salary
FROM Employee
A more drastic approach is to avoid the problem of extracting the salary history by reorganizing the schema to separate salary, title, and date of birth information (in the following, we ignore the date of birth, for simplicity).
Employee1 (Name, Salary, Start DATE, Stop DATE)
Employee2 (Name, Title, Start DATE, Stop DATE)
Name Salary Start Stop
---- ------ ----- ----
Bob 60000 1993-01-01 1993-05-30
Bob 70000 1993-06-01 1993-12-31
Name Title Start Stop
---- ------ ----- ----
Bob Assistant Provost 1993-01-01 1993-09-30
Bob Provost 1993-10-01 1994-01-31
Bob Professor 1994-02-01 1994-12-31
SELECT Salary, Start, Stop
FROM Employee1
WHERE Name = 'Bob'
SELECT Employee1.Name, Salary, Dept, Employee1.Start, Employee1.Stop
FROM Employee1, Employee2
WHERE Employee1.Name = Employee2.Name
AND Employee2.Start <= Employee1.Start AND Employee1.Stop < Employee2.Stop
UNION
SELECT Employee1.Name, Salary, Dept, Employee1.Start, Employee2.Stop
FROM Employee1, Employee2
WHERE Employee1.Name = Employee2.Name
AND Employee1.Start >= Employee2.Start AND Employee2.Stop < Employee1.Stop
AND Employee1.Start < Employee2.Stop
UNION
SELECT Employee1.Name, Salary, Dept, Employee2.Start, Employee1.Stop
FROM Employee1, Employee2
WHERE Employee1.Name = Employee2.Name
AND Employee2.Start > Employee1.Start AND Employee1.Stop < Employee2.Stop
AND Employee2.Start < Employee1.Stop
UNION
SELECT Employee1.Name, Salary, Dept, Employee2.Start, Employee2.Stop
FROM Employee1, Employee2
WHERE Employee1.Name = Employee2.Name
AND Employee2.Start > Employee1.Start AND Employee2.Stop < Employee1.Stop
SELECT Employee1.Name, Salary, Dept
FROM Employee1, Employee2
WHERE Employee1.Name = Employee2.Name
Now the OAP is asked, what is the maximum salary? Before adding time, this was easy.
SELECT MAX(Salary)
FROM Employee
SELECT Salary
FROM Employee AS E1
WHERE NOT EXISTS (SELECT *
FROM Employee AS E2
WHERE E2.Salary > E1.Salary)
CREATE TABLE Temp (Salary, Start, Stop)
AS SELECT Salary, Start, Stop
FROM Employee;
INSERT INTO Temp
SELECT T.Salary, T.Start, E.Start
FROM Temp AS T, Employee AS E
WHERE E.Start >= T.Start AND E.Start < T.Stop AND E.Salary > T.Salary;
INSERT INTO Temp
SELECT T.Salary, T.Stop, E.Stop
FROM Temp AS T, Employee AS E
WHERE E.Stop > T.Start AND E.Stop <= T.Stop AND E.Salary > T.Salary;
DELETE FROM Temp T
WHERE EXISTS (SELECT *
FROM Employee AS E
WHERE ((T.Start => E.Start AND T.Start < E.Stop)
OR (E.Start >= T.Start AND E.Start < T.Stop))
AND E.Salary > T.Salary;
A third alternative is to use SQL as little as possible, and instead compute the desired maximum history in a host language using cursors.
The query in TSQL2 is again straightforward and intuitive.
SELECT MAX(Salary)
FROM Employee
Time-varying data is manipulated in most database applications. Valid-time support is absent in SQL. Many common temporal queries are either difficult to simulate in SQL, or require embedding SQL in a procedural language, due to SQL's lack of support for valid-time tables in its data model and query constructs.
Elsewhere, we showed that adding valid-time support requires few changes to the DBMS implementation, can dramatically simplify some queries and enable others, and can later enable optimizations in storage structures, indexing methods, and optimization strategies that can yield significant performance improvements.
With a new part of SQL3 supporting time-varying information, we can begin to address such applications, enabling SQL3 to better manage temporal data.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Accredited Standards Committee* X3, Information Technology
NEWS RELEASE
Doc. No.: PR/96-0002
Reply to: Barbara Bennett at bbennett@itic.nw.dc.us
X3 Announces the Approval of a New Project, ISO/IEC
9075 Part 7: SQL/Temporal
Washington D.C., January 1996
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Inquiries regarding this project should be sent to the
Chairman of X3H2,
Dr. Donald R. Deutsch,
Sybase, Inc., Suite 800,
6550 Rock Spring
Drive, Bethesda, MD 20817.
Email: deutsch@sybase.com.
X3 Secretariat at
1250 Eye Street
NW, Suite 200,
Washington DC 20005.
Email: x3sec@itic.nw.dc.us
FAX: (202)638-4922.
A new ISO/IEC international standardization project for development of an SQL class library for multimedia applications was approved in early 1993. This new standardization activity, named SQL Multimedia (SQL/MM), will specify packages of SQL abstract data type (ADT) definitions using the facilities for ADT specification and invocation provided in the emerging SQL3 specification. SQL/MM intends to standardize class libraries for science and engineering, full-text and document processing, and methods for the management of multimedia objects such as image, sound, animation, music, and video. It will likely provide an SQL language binding for multimedia objects defined by other JTC1 standardization bodies (e.g. SC18 for documents, SC24 for images, and SC29 for photographs and motion pictures).
The Project Plan for SQL/MM indicates that it will be a multi-part standard consisting of an evolving number of parts. Part 1 will be a Framework that specifies how the other parts are to be constructed. Each of the other parts will be devoted to a specific SQL application package. The following SQL/MM Part structure exists as of August 1994:
There are a number of standards efforts in the area of Spatial and Geographic information: