Oracle ANSI SQL and the WITH syntax

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SQL language has been around for so long, that some people feel it never changes. This is obviously not true – SQL is a dynamic language that changes all the time: some changes come from the vendors themselves but often this is the result of the standard changing and Oracle adopting the new standard in a later version.

Let’s start with a short history lesson. As we all know, SQL is not a unique language for Oracle. It’s a common language with standards set by ANSI. The first version of the language standardization was presented back in 1986 with the issuance of SQL86. In 1992, a revised version of the language came out (SQL-92). When Oracle tried to implement this standard at full, they noticed that some of the things there are really different from how Oracle did things so it adopted only a part of the standard in Oracle RDBMS 8 (and 8i).
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