I am starting to compile the system documentation for a fairly complex
database system.
Part of the documentation will present ER diagrams for closely related
groups of tables, with some discussion of their usage and

I want to find the name and age of the oldest sailor. In a slide I read
it says that this code:
Select S.sname, Max(s.age)
from Sailors S

I'm a PostgreSQL novice looking for good forum or list to read/post
PostgreSQL-specific stuff.  Any suggestions would be much appreciated!
Thanks!
kj

I recently saw a comment by CELKO regarding SQL Triggers that advised
to "...avoid triggers whenever possible.".  This is the first time I'd
ever heard anything bad said about triggers and was wondering if
someone could give me some insight behind that advise?

I wish to design a database to track product subscriptions. Products
will be available Daily, Weekly or Monthly.
I have my products table which will contain:
- id

I am currently on a project which the source data come into the
databases is always dirty (not surprisingly); however, due to the
design of the database, it is very difficult to impose referential
integrity (esp. Foreign Keys) on these tables. Am I just not thinking

Hello. I'm working on a database (postgresql) structure and some of the
tables in it
must store bit fields. Later on it must handle queries like "give me
all rows in this table that have bit N set to 1 AND bit M set to 0 AND

About to embark on a new project... no customer at this time.
I've narrowed the backend choices down to MySQL and Oracle (partly a
tech decision, partly a market reality decision).  In a world without
constraints, I'd choose Oracle since I have used it since version 7 and

I never had access to a dbms that supports the "natural join".
AFAICT those that do (which are they BTW?) define a natural join via the
column names.
Wouldn't it make much more sense to use foreign key constraints to define

greetings all...  If someone could provide me with some insight as to
how I should break up and normailze these tables I'd be most
appreciative.  I am struggling with putting my own tables in order,
although I do understand the concepts of normaization.

what would be the sql statement for increase loading data, im looking
for way of incremental loading data to datawerhouse.
regards
Peter

A client has asked me to move some data into SQL file format, and I was
wondering if I could use MySQL to do it. Is MySQL file format identical
to SQL file format? Thanks in advance for the info.
-Vik

Can the keywords "CROSS JOIN" always be replaced by a comma or are
there circumstances in which they are necessary.

The SQL generated by the PostgreSQL utility pg_dump includes
statements like
ALTER TABLE ONLY foo
   ADD CONSTRAINT "$2" FOREIGN KEY (bar) REFERENCES baz(quux) ON UPDATE NO ACTION ON DELETE NO ACTION;

This is a question about query performance.
I'm looking at one table with two columns, one of which a text column,
the other a decimal.
CREATE TABLE Q (