BNF Grammars for SQL-92, SQL-99 and SQL-2003

This repository contains the BNF (Backus-Naur Form) grammars for three versions of standard SQL — SQL-92, SQL-99 and SQL-2003.

You should be able to find a version of this site with 'active HTML' at:

• https://ronsavage.github.io/SQL/

It may not be the most recent release, but the technical content is mostly valid. The download link is not functional — you can obtain the material for the latest release from https://github.com/ronsavage/SQL/releases/latest.

** !! Syntax Rules

Regarding the text '!! See the Syntax Rules': That is literally what it says in the PDF containing the standard.

For an extract of the standard about these rules see the file 'Syntax.rules.txt'.

This project is still in transition to GitHub. The links in this README.md file lead to the pages in the GitHub source tree. Most of them will display the HTML source — not a rendered HTML image. There probably are ways around that; we're learning GitHub as we go.

For a long time, this material was hosted by Ron Savage at http://savage.net.au/SQL — many thanks, Ron! — but that site now points to here.

At the moment, the suggested method of operation is:

• Clone this repository to your machine — e.g. into the /home/somebody/SQL directory
• Point your browser to file:///home/somebody/SQL/index.html.

This should give you full HTML access to the material. Alternatively, you can download the latest release of this material (instead of cloning the repo), and then extract that into a directory and point your browser to the index.html file in that directory.

Yes: it is sub-optimal. Yes: we'll fix it when we know how to fix it.

SQL-92

The file sql-92.bnf.html is a heavily hyperlinked HTML version of the BNF grammar for SQL-92 (ISO/IEC 9075:1992 - Database Language - SQL).

The plain text file sql-92.bnf, from which it was automatically converted, is more useful (read legible) for reading without a browser.

SQL-99

The file sql-99.bnf.html is a heavily hyperlinked HTML version of the BNF grammar for SQL-99 (ISO/IEC 9075-2:1999 - Database Languages - SQL - Part 2: Foundation (SQL/Foundation)).

The plain text file sql-99.bnf, from which it was automatically converted, is more useful (read legible) for reading without a browser.

SQL-2003

The file sql-2003-2.bnf.html is a heavily hyperlinked HTML version of the BNF grammar for SQL-2003 (ISO/IEC 9075-2:2003 - Database Languages - SQL - Part 2: Foundation (SQL/Foundation)).

The plain text file sql-2003-2.bnf, from which it was automatically converted, is more useful (read legible) for reading without a browser.

There is a separate file sql-2003-1.bnf.html for the information from ISO/IEC 9075-1:2003 - Database Languages - SQL - Part 1: Framework (SQL/Framework).

It was automatically converted from the plain text file sql-2003-1.bnf, which is more useful (read legible) for reading without a browser.

Also available:

SQL 2003 Core Features

SQL 2003 Non-Core Features

Informix OUTER Join Syntax

The file outer-joins.html is an explanation of the non-standard Informix OUTER join syntax and semantics.

Conversion tools

The plain text was converted to HTML by the Perl script bnf2html which you may use if you wish. The bnf2html script also uses the C program WEBCODE version 1.09 which you can download as a gzipped tar file.

See also bnf2yacc, an experimental script to convert BNF into an outline Yacc grammar. The generated grammar typically includes some unacceptable tokens, such as %token 0, that should be handled by the lexical analyzer rather than the grammar. The SQL standard includes such rules as grammar rules; consequently, you won't get a clean Yacc grammar from the SQL BNF files.

(The Perl scripts should normally be renamed after downloading.)

Download

You should be able to get the downloadable version of the latest release of this repository from the releases area:

• https://github.com/ronsavage/SQL/releases/latest

SQL 2016 Released

ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 32 Publishes Updated SQL Database Language Standard — SQL 2016.

---

Please send feedback to Jonathan Leffler ( [email protected] ) _and_ Ron Savage ( [email protected] ).

Last modified: 13th March 2017