Structured Query Language

From Unofficial BOINC Wiki

[edit] General

A programming language that is used in conjunction with Relational Databases to manipulate the contents and structures of the Database. A formal language with proprietary extensions offered by all of the main producers of Relational Database Engines. The language allows for the expression of the data desired and is based on set theory. The language does not allow for the specification of how the data is to be accessed, only how the sets of data are to be organized and the results returned.

One of the interesting characteristics of SQL that makes it so much fun is that an extremely simple query can take forever to execute while a seemingly outrageous statement can execute in seconds. In two of my personal experiences I had a Small and Bad SQL Query that was very small and took 4 hours and 15 some odd minutes to execute (and returned only 2 rows; the reason for this behavior is that we were plowing through on 4,579,000 some odd records to find the two), while another Large and Good SQL Query that looks like it will take forever, yet takes only milliseconds to execute.

The BOINC Database is based on an Open Source Relational Database named "MySQL".