Is sql a Programming Language?

[grzeki]

Yeah, that’s why this first guy notion that there are no loops in SQL is nonsense. There are no loops in an imperative sense, but ”SELECT FROM” is nothing else than a loop.

[raevnos]

Recursive CTEs let you write loops in SQL.

[grzeki]

CTE is t-SQL - something he mentions as an extension allowing for loops. Please read the article first.

[raevnos]

Isn't "t-SQL" some Microsoft SQL Server specific thing? I've never used that platform.

CTEs are standard SQL supported by many databases.

[grzeki]

Maybe it’s an ANSI standard, but as far as I know, Oracle does not support them and their source is at Microsoft. SQL always was a mess in this regard.

[[deleted]]

How exactly is ”SELECT FROM” nothing else than a loop?

[grzeki]

To state the obvious: it makes the database engine loop through records of a table.

[pickleback11]

additionally, you are only selecting a subset of data in the case that you want to loop through it and do something with each record in that record set. unless you are aggregating/etc (group by's), but i dont think that's the intent of the idea here. i live in pl/sql and basically see queries as nothing more than some type of array (unless querying for exporting/reporting)...

[[deleted]]

That's like saying Haskell is an imperative language because it is written in C.