There are versions of the SQL3 document available at http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/lehre/SS94/einfdb/SQL3/sqlindex.html and http://dbs.uni-leipzig.de/en/lokal/standards.pdf, free of charge.
PB ----- ----- Original Message ----- From: Neil Zanella To: MySQL Mailing List Sent: Wednesday, June 04, 2003 12:03 AM Subject: MySQL: standard SQL compliancy: primary keys: default: should be NOT NULL Hello, I believe that MySQL is in error in reporting the following message just because I did not specify that the PRIMARY KEY should not be NULL. These days there are standards and SQL92, AFAIK, specifies that if the primary key is not explicitly set to NOT NULL then the RDBMS should automatically and silently assume the user means NOT NULL. After all, any half decent book on relational databases out there will tell you that primary keys cannot be null. So why does MySQL do it this way. By doing this MySQL is breaking the portability of my standard SQL code which works so well with postgreSQL and Oracle 9i. So why donesn't MySQL play nice and abide to the standard? Is this fixed in MySQL 4? I am running MySQL 3.23.54a as distributed with Red Hat 9, which, for some reason has not decided to update their mysql RPMS to MySQL 4 for that release but I am interesting in knowing if this has been fixed in MySQL. I think one of MySQL's goals should be to support standards such as SQL92 (if not SQL99). Even if internally some things don't work as expected, at a minimum, the parsers should be compatible as much as possible, including standard data types and assuming primary keys are not null by default. ERROR 1171: All parts of a PRIMARY KEY must be NOT NULL; If you need NULL in a key, use UNIQUE instead BTW, for those willing to check it out, Part 1 (as well as other parts) of the SQL standard are available from http://webstore.ansi.org/ for 18 bucks as standard INCITS/ISO/IEC 9075-1-1999. The older standard is also available as ANSI INCITS 135-1992 (R1998) at the same price. Regards, Neil -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
