ANSI Standards

The following documents of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) relate to SQL:

■ANSI/ISO/IEC 9075-1:1999, Information technology—Database languages—SQL—Part 1: Framework (SQL/Framework)

■ ANSI/ISO/IEC 9075-1:1999/Amd.1:2000

■ANSI/ISO/IEC 9075-2:1999, Information technology—Database languages—SQL—Part 2: Foundation (SQL/Foundation)

■ANSI/ISO/IEC 9075-5:1999, Information technology—Database languages—SQL—Part 5: Host Language Bindings (SQL/Bindings)

You can obtain a copy of ANSI standards from this address:

American National Standards Institute

11 West 42nd Street

New York, NY 10036 USA

Telephone: +1.212.642.4900

Fax: +1.212.398.0023

or from their Web site:

http://webstore.ansi.org/ansidocstore/default.asp

A subset of ANSI standards, including the SQL standard, are X3 or NCITS standards. You can obtain these from the National Committee for Information Technology Standards (NCITS) at:

http://www.cssinfo.com/ncitsgate.html

ISO Standards

The following documents of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) relate to SQL:

■ISO/IEC 9075-1:1999, Information technology—Database languages—SQL—Part 1: Framework (SQL/Framework)

■ ISO/IEC 9075-1:1999/Amd.1:2000

■ISO/IEC 9075-2:1999, Information technology—Database languages—SQL—Part 2: Foundation (SQL/Foundation)

B-2 Oracle9i SQL Reference

■ISO/IEC 9075-5:1999, Information technology—Database languages—SQL—Part 5: Host Language Bindings (SQL/Bindings)

You can obtain a copy of ISO standards from this address:

International Organization for Standardization 1 Rue de Varembé

Case postale 56

CH-1211, Geneva 20, Switzerland Phone: +41.22.749.0111

Fax: +41.22.733.3430

Web site: http://www.iso.ch/

or from their web store:

http://www.iso.ch/cate/cat.html

Oracle Compliance

The ANSI and ISO SQL standards require conformance claims to state the type of conformance and the implemented facilities. The following products provide full or partial conformance with the ANSI and ISO standards as described in the tables that follow:

The Core SQL:1999 features that Oracle fully supports are listed in Table B–1:

Oracle and Standard SQL B-3

B-4 Oracle9i SQL Reference

The Core SQL:1999 features that Oracle partially supports are listed in Table B–2:

Table B–2 Partially Supported Core SQL:1999 Features

Oracle partially supports these subfeatures:

■ E021-02, CHARACTER VARYING data type (Oracle does not distinguish a zero-length VARCHAR string from NULL)

■ E021-03, Character literals (Oracle regards the zero-length literal ’’ as being null)

Oracle has equivalent functionality for these subfeatures:

■ E021-04, CHARACTER_LENGTH function: use LENGTH function instead

■ E021-05, OCTET_LENGTH function: use LENGTHB function instead

■ E021-06, SUBSTRING function: use SUBSTR function instead

■ E021-11, POSITION function: use INSTR function instead

Oracle and Standard SQL B-5

Table B–2 (Cont.) Partially Supported Core SQL:1999 Features

Oracle partially supports the following subfeatures:

■E051-08, Correlation names in FROM clause (Oracle supports correlation names, but not the optional AS keyword)

Oracle does not support the following subfeature:

■E051-09, Rename columns in the FROM clause

B-6 Oracle9i SQL Reference

Table B–2 (Cont.) Partially Supported Core SQL:1999 Features

■E071-06, table operators in subqueries

Oracle has equivalent functionality for the following subfeature:

■E071-03, EXCEPT DISTINCT table operator: Use MINUS instead of EXCEPT DISTINCT

E121, Basic cursor support Oracle fully supports the following subfeatures:

■E121-01, DECLARE CURSOR

Oracle and Standard SQL B-7

Table B–2 (Cont.) Partially Supported Core SQL:1999 Features

Oracle supports these subfeatures with syntactic differences:

The Oracle syntax for CREATE FUNCTION and CREATE PROCEDURE differs from the standard as follows:

■In the standard, the mode of a parameter (IN, OUT or INOUT) comes before the parameter name, whereas in Oracle it comes after the parameter name.

■If the routine body is in C (for example), then the standard uses the keywords LANGUAGE C EXTERNAL NAME to name the routine, whereas Oracle uses LANGUAGE C NAME.

■If the routine body is in SQL, then Oracle uses its proprietary procedural extension called PL/SQL.

Oracle supports the following subfeatures in PL/SQL but not in Oracle SQL:

■T321-05, RETURN statement

Oracle has equivalent functionality for the features listed in Table B–3:

B-8 Oracle9i SQL Reference

Table B–3 Equivalent Functionality for Core SQL:1999 Features

The Core SQL:1999 features that Oracle does not support are listed in Table B–4:

Note: Oracle does not support E182, Module language. Although this feature is listed in Table 31 in the standard, it merely indicates that Core consists of a choice between Module language and embedded language. Module language and embedded language are completely equivalent in capability, differing only in the manner in which SQL statements are associated with the host programming language. Oracle supports embedded language.

Oracle and Standard SQL B-9