Chapter 12 – Query Languages1

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses query languages. A query language is a special-purpose language for constructing queries to retrieve information from a database of information stored in the computer. It is usually intended to be used by people who are not professional programmers. Query languages differ in ways that might affect their ease of use. One obvious way in which query languages can differ is in syntactic form. The two languages, QBE and SQL, differ syntactically both in overall structure and in many syntactic details. For its overall structure, QBE uses a two-dimensional syntax, in which users write queries by filling in forms on a CRT screen. SQL, on the other hand, uses a linear syntax, written in normal left-to-right, top-to-bottom fashion. In most query languages, the user is assumed to have a conceptual view of how the data are stored in the computer. He might think of the data as stored in tabular form, for example, or in a hierarchy.

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