Describing Oracle Syntax

What do FORTRAN and Oracle
have in common? The answer to this question is at the end of the article, so
before we get there, allow me to use the study of mathematics as a model.

For math majors at many
colleges and universities, a required course or elective covers the subject of math
history. Manipulating formulas and applying concepts to solve practical and
theoretical problems is at the heart of being a math major. However, a course
on math history helps provide a student with some appreciation about his chosen
field of study. Knowing some history behind the three L’s (Laplace, Legendre,
and Lagrange) or the roots of probability theory (and the interesting history
behind the entire Bernoulli family) gives you an appreciation of what obstacles
some (now, but not necessarily back then) famous mathematicians faced in their
day. Things you take for granted today were not so obvious hundreds of years
ago.

In virtually all of Oracle’s
documentation, you see two types of syntax: graphical and something called
Backus-Naur Form syntax. The graphical syntax examples are quite obvious when
they are in their, well, graphical format. Let’s take a look at the CREATE
TABLE syntax (using the SQL Reference Guide). Part of the graphical representation
of the CREATE TABLE syntax is shown below.

Presenting data definition
or data manipulation language (DML and DDL) syntax in this form offers an
intuitively easy format for humans to read and follow. If you take note of what
is underneath each path, you will see a link to "Text description of
create table" and "Text description of relational table." Oracle
documentation is replete with these syntax paths and their links to their text
descriptions.

At the beginning of most
documents, Oracle provides a section on "Conventions in Code Examples"
and Oracle is not alone in this regard. Wherever there is code syntax,
virtually all major vendors provide a section on how to "read" their
code. Without knowing exactly why, you probably already know that optional
items or keywords are enclosed in brackets and that they are separated by the "|"
symbol.

Therefore, looking at the
text description of the CREATE TABLE command confirms Oracle’s adherence to
following its own convention.


CREATE [GLOBAL TEMPORARY] TABLE [schema.] table
[ (relational_properties) ]
[ON COMMIT {DELETE | PRESERVE} ROWS]
physical_properties
table_properties;

{ { column | attribute } [DEFAULT expr]
[inline_constraint {inline_constraint]… | inline_ref_constraint]
| { out_of_line_constraint | out_of_line_ref_constraint | supplemental_logging_props }
}

The conventions cover what
bold, italics, uppercase, lowercase and combinations thereof mean or depict,
and meanings are defined for symbols such as brackets, braces, vertical bars
and ellipses. You have seen this syntax a million times, but do you know where
it came from?

The text description of
command syntax is known as Backus-Naur Form syntax, and is commonly referred to
as BNF notation. As you may deduce from the names, Oracle did not invent this
syntax, but it certainly follows it (or a modified form of it).

In fact, because Oracle’s
version of SQL is by and large ANSI compliant, you would be correct in assuming
that Oracle’s adherence to BNF notation closely follows what would be found in
the ANSI version of a command such as the CREATE TABLE statement. This leads us
to a "standards" type of Web site for SQL.

In case you didn’t know,
ANSI (American National Standards Institute) goes well beyond the IT field, and
a visit to their Web store provides a glimpse into all that ANSI covers. The
home page is at http://webstore.ansi.org/ansidocstore/default.asp.
Enter "database language" in the search field and you will see the
following page.

Clicking on the first item
in the table shows the following description of what was the X3.135-1992
standard.

For $18.00, you can purchase
the current SQL language standard and have access to all the gory details of
the SQL language.

The standard itself uses BNF
notation and provides a section on exactly how it uses it.

What does the CREATE TABLE
syntax look like?

You can see the basis for Oracle’s
syntax and how it follows BNF notation.

Who or what is Backus-Naur?

John Backus and Peter Naur
answer the "who" part of this question. John Backus developed a
syntax or programming grammar for use with the ALGOL programming language in
1958 (referred to as ALGOL 58). By the 1960 release (ALGOL 60), Peter Naur had
revised and expanded the rules and the syntax became known as Backus-Naur Form
(BNF), and that answers the "what" part.

John Backus won the Turing
Award in 1977 for his work in the field of computer science. Winning the Turing
Award places one in rarefied company, and reading the list of previous winners
is like reading the "Who’s Who" of the computer science field. Among
the many notable names is none other than E.F. Codd, whom, interestingly
enough, has another "NF" acronym associated with his name, namely,
normal form (1NF, 2NF, etc.).

Peter Naur, on the other
hand, prefers that his name not be associated with the BNF syntax (call it
Backus Normal Form instead). The hyphenated name combination stuck and that’s
why we have BNF.

Back to my original question

At the beginning of the
article, I asked what do FORTRAN (an old programming language, also referred to
as Fortran) and Oracle have in common? John Backus is credited with having
developed Fortran, which was the first high-level programming language. And, as
discussed, Oracle syntax, by way of following the ANSI standard for the SQL
database language, complies with the conventions of the Backus-Naur Form
syntax. Now you know the rest of the story.

In Closing

In many fields, being able
to illustrate an interesting historical perspective can serve to heighten a
student’s interest. Many IT subjects are extremely dry and uninteresting in of
themselves, so when someone asks you what "Oracle" is (yes, there is
a section titled, "What is Oracle?"), you can go beyond "An
Oracle database is a collection of data treated as a unit." Imagine what
the IT industry was like 50 years ago. For one, it was not even an industry, at
least as we know it today. Given how much the IT field has changed in just the
past ten years, how likely do you think it is that some procedural language or
syntax invented today will still be in use 50 years from now? For example, the
C programming language was replaced by C++. That’s part of the joke behind "C++"
as the name of the next version ("++" meaning is to increment by
one). C# is just around the corner.

The fact that we still use
the Backus-Naur Form syntax today, I think, is pretty amazing. It seems so
simple and obvious that we should follow a standardized syntax, but what was
there to work with 50 years ago? Just like in math, use of the definite
integral today to calculate the area under a curve seems like a no-brainer, but
it took literally hundreds of years to develop the theory that enables us to
add an infinite number of Riemann sums. Think about what you know today, Oracle
database or anything else in the IT field, and how much of it will be around in
ten years, let alone 50 years?

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Steve Callan

Steve Callan
Steve Callan
Steve is an Oracle DBA (OCP 8i and 9i)/developer working in Denver. His Oracle experience also includes Forms and Reports, Oracle9iAS and Oracle9iDS.

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