An SQL UPDATE statement changes the data of one or more records in a table. Either all the rows can be updated, or a subset may be chosen using a condition.
The UPDATE
statement has the following form:
For the UPDATE
to be successful, the user must have data manipulation privileges (UPDATE
privilege) on the table or column and the updated value must not conflict with all the applicable constraints (such as primary keys, unique indexes, CHECK
constraints, and NOT NULL
constraints).
In some databases, such as PostgreSQL, when a FROM clause is present, what essentially happens is that the target table is joined to the tables mentioned in the fromlist, and each output row of the join represents an update operation for the target table. When using FROM, one should ensure that the join produces at most one output row for each row to be modified. In other words, a target row shouldn't join to more than one row from the other table(s). If it does, then only one of the join rows will be used to update the target row, but which one will be used is not readily predictable.
SQL (i/ˈɛs kjuː ˈɛl/, or
i/ˈsiːkwəl/;Structured Query Language) is a special-purpose programming language designed for managing data held in a relational database management system (RDBMS), or for stream processing in a relational data stream management system (RDSMS).
Originally based upon relational algebra and tuple relational calculus, SQL consists of a data definition language, data manipulation language, and a data control language. The scope of SQL includes data insert, query, update and delete, schema creation and modification, and data access control. Although SQL is often described as, and to a great extent is, a declarative language (4GL), it also includes procedural elements.
SQL was one of the first commercial languages for Edgar F. Codd's relational model, as described in his influential 1970 paper, "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks." Despite not entirely adhering to the relational model as described by Codd, it became the most widely used database language.
SQL 2008 can refer to
SQL:2006 or ISO/IEC 9075:2006 standard is the fifth revision of the ISO standard for the SQL database query language.
The main changes from SQL:2003 were in the Part 14 of the standard.
ISO/IEC 9075-14:2006 defines ways in which SQL can be used in conjunction with XML. It defines ways of importing and storing XML data in an SQL database, manipulating it within the database and publishing both XML and conventional SQL-data in XML form. In addition, it enables applications to integrate into their SQL code the use of XQuery, the XML Query Language published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), to concurrently access ordinary SQL-data and XML documents.