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An anonymous poem on SQL, for those who haven't seen it

johnwcowan@johnwcowan
#1 · September 30, 2019, 10:28 pm
All the snake-oil peddlers say, there's a fast and easy way,
To get your SQL program up and running,
But they're silent re: the traps, that cause subtly buggy apps,
For to catch the unaware a chasm's yawning!

Date-arithmetic exceptions, auto-rollbacked disconnections,
Bit precisions, overflows, collate coercions,
And how NULL affects your summing, for to keep your DB humming,
You must know what happens in all vendors' versions!

Should this field be DOUBLE PRECISION?
Will logic rules soon see revision?
By the ANSI:Databases sub-committee?
When you DROP should you CASCADE?
How are NATURAL joins made?
Re UNIQUE-keys matching check the nitty-gritty!

Yeah the true and standard facts, you'll avoid those later hacks
That make Structured Query Language such a bore,
You'll find tips and charts aplenty, in this one-thousand-and-twenty
Four page volume (with an index), and yet more!
Dave Voorhis@Dave
#2 · October 1, 2019, 8:47 am

Excellent.

I'm the forum administrator and lead developer of Rel. Email me at dave@armchair.mb.ca with the Subject 'TTM Forum'. Download Rel from https://reldb.org
Hugh@hugh-darwen-2
#3 · October 1, 2019, 10:43 am

Very nice, though I'm always annoyed by people who seem to think that it's the American national standards institute that drafts the standard.  Like all the other contributing national bodies, they publish the international standard as an endorsement under their own name.  I've never referred to the BSI endorsement as the BSI standard, for example.

I've forwarded the doggerel to Chris Date.

Hugh

Coauthor of The Third Manifesto and related books.
johnwcowan@johnwcowan
Topic Author
#4 · October 9, 2019, 2:59 pm
Quote from Hugh on October 1, 2019, 10:43 am

Very nice, though I'm always annoyed by people who seem to think that it's the American national standards institute that drafts the standard.

True now, but not always so.  It was ANSI X3 that developed SQL-86, and ISO followed only in 1987.

By the way, the SQL-86 and SQL-88 standards have completely fallen off the edge of the world, it seems.  You can't buy them from ISO or any NB, because they existed only in print; WorldCat lists only a few copies in extremely obscure libraries; there are no online scans that anyone has found.  If anyone here has a copy of either, I would cheerfully pay postage both ways so that I could make my own copy, as retrocomputing is a great interest of mine.