If anyone thinks my comments on the lack of standard-conformance among
vendors of popular DBMS were a bit harsh, then I recommend the website of
Troels Arvin of Copenhagen who provides a wealth of supporting detail.
He also covers date/time and string functionality which I did not cover at
all, but which may be important to astronomers:
http://troels.arvin.dk/db/rdbms/
I continue to be amazed by all this: every vendor of a compiler for say C or Fortran feels obliged to implement every last detail of the relevant ANSI or ISO Standard, or else their product gets drummed out of town. But the DBMS vendors hardly even pay lip service to the SQL Standard, despite which users seem happy to give them huge sums of money and their reward is get locked into one product indefinitely.
-- Clive Page Dept of Physics & Astronomy, University of Leicester, Tel +44 116 252 3551 Leicester, LE1 7RH, U.K. Fax +44 116 252 3311Received on 2003-12-03Z12:52:46