02 - Modern SQL

Relational Languages

Edgar Codd published a major paper on relational models in the early 1970s. Originally, he only defined the mathematical notation for how a DBMS could execute queries on a relational model DBMS. The user only needs to specify the result that they want using a declarative language (i.e., SQL). The DBMS is responsible for determining the most efficient plan to produce that answer. Relational algebra is based on sets (unordered, no duplicates). SQL is based on bags (unordered, allows duplicates).

SQL History

Declarative query language for relational databases. It was originally developed in the 1970s as part of the IBM System R project. IBM originally called it “SEQUEL” (Structured English Query Language). The name changed in the 1980s to just “SQL” (Structured Query Language).

The language is comprised of different classes of commands:

1. Data Manipulation Language (DML): SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE statements.
2. **Data Definition Language (DDL): **Schema definitions for tables, indexes, views, and other objects.
3. **Data Control Language (DCL): **Security, access controls.

SQL is not a dead language. It is being updated with new features every couple of years. SQL-92 is the minimum that a DBMS has to support to claim they support SQL. Each vendor follows the standard to a certain degree but there are many proprietary extensions.

Some of the major updates released with each new edition of the SQL standard are shown below.

• SQL:1999 Regular expressions, Triggers
• SQL:2003 XML, Windows, Sequences
• SQL:2008 Truncation, Fancy sorting
• SQL:2011 Temporal DBs, Pipelined DML
• SQL:2016 JSON, Polymorphic tables

Joins

Combines columns from one or more tables and produces a new table. Used to express queries that involve data that spans multiple tables. Example: Which students got an A in 15-721?

CREATE TABLE student (
  sid INT PRIMARY KEY,
  name VARCHAR(16),
  login VARCHAR(32) UNIQUE,
  age SMALLINT,
  gpa FLOAT
);

CREATE TABLE course (
  cid VARCHAR(32) PRIMARY KEY,
  name VARCHAR(32) NOT NULL
);

CREATE TABLE enrolled (
  sid INT REFERENCES student (sid),
  cid VARCHAR(32) REFERENCES course (cid),
  grade CHAR(1)
);

SELECT s.name
	FROM enrolled AS e, student AS s
WHERE e.grade = 'A' AND e.cid = '15-721'
	AND e.sid = s.sid;

Aggregates

An aggregation function takes in a bag of tuples as its input and then produces a single scalar value as its output. Aggregate functions can (almost) only be used in a SELECT output list.

• AVG(COL): The average of the values in COL
• MIN(COL): The minimum value in COL
• MAX(COL): The maximum value in COL
• COUNT(COL): The number of tuples in the relation

Example: Get # of students with a ‘@cs’ login. The following three queries are equivalent:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM student WHERE login LIKE '%@cs';

SELECT COUNT(login) FROM student WHERE login LIKE '%@cs';

SELECT COUNT(1) FROM student WHERE login LIKE '%@cs';

A single SELECT statement can contain multiple aggregates: Example: Get # of students and their average GPA with a ‘@cs’ login.

SELECT AVG(gpa), COUNT(sid) FROM student WHERE login LIKE '%@cs';

Some aggregate functions (e.g. COUNT, SUM, AVG) support the DISTINCT keyword: Example: Get # of unique students and their average GPA with a ‘@cs’ login.

SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT login) FROM student WHERE login LIKE '%@cs';

Output of other columns outside of an aggregate is undefined (e.cid is undefined below). Example: Get the average GPA of students in each course.

SELECT AVG(s.gpa), e.cid FROM enrolled AS e, student AS s WHERE e.sid = s.sid;

Non-aggregated values in SELECT output clause must appear in GROUP BY clause.

SELECT AVG(s.gpa), e.cid 
	FROM enrolled AS e, student AS s
WHERE e.sid = s.sid
	GROUP BY e.cid;

The HAVING clause filters output results based on aggregation computation. This make HAVING behave like a WHERE clause for a GROUP BY. Example: Get the set of courses in which the average student GPA is greater than 3.9.

SELECT AVG(s.gpa) AS avg_gpa, e.cid
	FROM enrolled AS e, student AS s
WHERE e.sid = s.sid
	GROUP BY e.cid
HAVING avg_gpa > 3.9;

The above query syntax is supported by many major database systems, but is not compliant with the SQL standard. To make the query standard compliant, we must repeat use of AVG(S.GPA) in the body of the HAVING clause.

SELECT AVG(s.gpa), e.cid
	FROM enrolled AS e, student AS s
WHERE e.sid = s.sid
	GROUP BY e.cid
HAVING AVG(s.gpa) > 3.9;

String Operations

The SQL standard says that strings are **case sensitive **and single-quotes only. There are functions to manipulate strings that can be used in any part of a query.

**Pattern Matching: **The LIKE keyword is used for string matching in predicates.

• “%” matches any substrings (including empty).
• “_” matches any one character.

String Functions SQL-92 defines string functions. Many database systems implement other functions in addition to those in the standard. Examples of standard string functions include SUBSTRING(S, B, E) and UPPER(S).

Concatenation: Two vertical bars (“||”) will concatenate two or more strings together into a single string.

Date and Time

Operations to manipulate DATE and TIME attributes. Can be used in either output or predicates. The specific syntax for date and time operations varies wildly across systems.

Output Redirection

Instead of having the result a query returned to the client (e.g., terminal), you can tell the DBMS to store the results into another table. You can then access this data in subsequent queries.

• New Table: Store the output of the query into a new (permanent) table.

SELECT DISTINCT cid INTO CourseIds FROM enrolled;

• Existing Table: Store the output of the query into a table that already exists in the database. The target table must have the same number of columns with the same types as the target table, but the names of the columns in the output query do not have to match.

INSERT INTO CourseIds (SELECT DISTINCT cid FROM enrolled);

Output Control

Since results SQL are unordered, we must use the ORDER BY clause to impose a sort on tuples:

SELECT sid, grade FROM enrolled WHERE cid = '15-721'
	ORDER BY grade;

The default sort order is ascending (ASC). We can manually specify DESC to reverse the order:

SELECT sid, grade FROM enrolled WHERE cid = '15-721'
	ORDER BY grade DESC;

We can use multiple ORDER BY clauses to break ties or do more complex sorting:

SELECT sid, grade FROM enrolled WHERE cid = '15-721'
ORDER BY grade DESC, sid ASC;

We can also use any arbitrary expression in the ORDER BY clause:

SELECT sid FROM enrolled WHERE cid = '15-721'
	ORDER BY UPPER(grade) DESC, sid + 1 ASC;

By default, the DBMS will return all of the tuples produced by the query. We can use the LIMIT clause to restrict the number of result tuples:

SELECT sid, name FROM student WHERE login LIKE '%@cs'
	LIMIT 10;

We can also provide an **offset **to return a range in the results:

SELECT sid, name FROM student WHERE login LIKE '%@cs'
	LIMIT 20 OFFSET 10;

Unless we use an ORDER BY clause with a LIMIT, **the DBMS may produce different tuples in the result **on each invocation of the query because the relational model does not impose an ordering.

Nested Queries

Invoke queries inside of other queries to execute more complex logic within a single query. Nested queries are often difficult to optimize. The scope of outer query is included in an inner query (i.e. the inner query can access attributes from outer query), but not the other way around. Inner queries can appear in almost any part of a query:

1. SELECT Output Targets:

SELECT (SELECT 1) AS one FROM student;

1. FROM Clause:

SELECT name
  FROM student AS s, (SELECT sid FROM enrolled) AS e
  WHERE s.sid = e.sid;

1. WHERE Clause:

SELECT name FROM student
	WHERE sid IN ( SELECT sid FROM enrolled );

Example: Get the names of students that are enrolled in ‘15-445’.

SELECT name FROM student
WHERE sid IN (
SELECT sid FROM enrolled
WHERE cid = '15-445'
);

Note that sid has different scope depending on where it appears in the query.

Example: Find student record with the highest id that is enrolled in at least one course.

SELECT student.sid, name
  FROM student
  JOIN (SELECT MAX(sid) AS sid
  	FROM enrolled) AS max_e
  ON student.sid = max_e.sid;

Nested Query Results Expressions:

• ALL: Must satisfy expression for all rows in sub-query.
• ANY: Must satisfy expression for at least one row in sub-query.
• IN: Equivalent to =ANY().
• EXISTS: At least one row is returned.

Example: Find all courses that have no students enrolled in it.

SELECT * FROM course
  WHERE NOT EXISTS(
  	SELECT * FROM enrolled
  		WHERE course.cid = enrolled.cid
);

Window Functions

A window function perform “sliding” calculation across a set of tuples that are related. Like an aggregation but tuples are not grouped into a single output tuple. **Functions: **The window function can be any of the aggregation functions that we discussed above. There are also also special window functions:

1. ROW_NUMBER: The number of the current row.
2. RANK: The order position of the current row.

Grouping: The OVER clause specifies how to group together tuples when computing the window function. Use PARTITION BY to specify group.

SELECT cid, sid, ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY cid)
FROM enrolled ORDER BY cid;

We can also put an ORDER BY within OVER to ensure a deterministic ordering of results even if database changes internally.

SELECT *, ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY cid)
FROM enrolled ORDER BY cid;

IMPORTANT: The DBMS computes RANK after the window function sorting, whereas it computes ROW_NUMBER before the sorting. Example: Find the student with the second highest grade for each course.

SELECT * FROM (
	SELECT *, RANK() OVER (PARTITION BY cid
		ORDER BY grade ASC) AS rank
	FROM enrolled) AS ranking
WHERE ranking.rank = 2;

Common Table Expressions

Common Table Expressions (CTEs) are an alternative to windows or nested queries when writing more complex queries. They provide a way to write auxiliary statements for user in a larger query. CTEs can be thought of as a temporary table that is scoped to a single query. The **WITH **clause binds the output of the inner query to a temporary result with that name. Example: Generate a CTE called cteName that contains a single tuple with a single attribute set to “1”. Select all attributes from this CTE. cteName.

WITH cteName AS (
SELECT 1
)
SELECT * FROM cteName;

We can bind output columns to names before the AS:

WITH cteName (col1, col2) AS (
SELECT 1, 2
)
SELECT col1 + col2 FROM cteName;

A single query may contain multiple CTE declarations:

WITH cte1 (col1) AS (SELECT 1), cte2 (col2) AS (SELECT 2)
SELECT * FROM cte1, cte2;

Adding the RECURSIVE keyword after WITH allows a CTE to reference itself. This enables the implementation of recursion in SQL queries. With recursive CTEs, SQL is provably Turing-complete, implying that it is as computationally expressive as more general purpose programming languages (if a bit more cumbersome). Example: Print the sequence of numbers from 1 to 10.

WITH RECURSIVE cteSource (counter) AS (
  ( SELECT 1 )
  UNION
  ( SELECT counter + 1 FROM cteSource
  WHERE counter < 10 )
)
SELECT * FROM cteSource;