Re: Textbooks on SQL compilation

All,


Kevin Watkins <kwatkins@odi.com> wrote:
  > Does anyone know of any text books dealing with the parsing/processing
  > of SQL? I'm thinking of something like the book by Holub on compiler
  > design, but targeted at SQL rather than a programming language like C.


edi-c@algonet.se "Kurt Svensson" writes:
> In the book "Understanding the new SQL, Melton & Simon,
> Morgan-Kaufman, 1993" there is a complete BNF grammar of SQL/92 (the


This is a very good book. The grammar from the SQL/2 standard is also
on-line (sorry have lost the address). The primary site of the SQL
Standards Archive is located at: ftp://jerry.ece.umassd.edu You might
like to have a look here.


> proposed new SQL language). The book also describes what each


"new SQL"? SQL/3 is just being finalised. So the 1992 standard will
soon be the old standard.


> statement and clause is supposed to do.
> [Parsing it is easy enough, it's what to do once you've parsed it that's
> hard. -John]


Actually parsing is quite hard. It took me nearly a month to get a
grammar for SQL/2 that did not have an excessive number of conflicts
(got it down to one shift/reduce).


If anybody is interested in the old old standard (1987) check out
alpha.gnu.ai.mit.edu/gnu/gnusql-0.7b3.tar.gz


This is an implementation of the 'original' SQL standard (it processes
Embedded SQL and turns it into C function calls) done by a group of
Russians. I had a quick play. It looks like it could turn into
something serious.


Given than many large, commercial, DBMS vendors don't support much
beyond the 1987 standard I wouldn't worry about the lack of support
for 1992 features.


derek


--
Derek M Jones tel: +44 (0) 1252 520 667
Knowledge Software Ltd mailto:derek@knosof.co.uk
Applications Standards Conformance Testing http://www.knosof.co.uk
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