Package ql implements a pure Go embedded SQL database engine. QL is a member of the SQL family of languages. It is less complex and less powerful than SQL (whichever specification SQL is considered to be). 2018-08-02: Release v1.2.0 adds initial support for Go modules. 2017-01-10: Release v1.1.0 fixes some bugs and adds a configurable WAL headroom. 2016-07-29: Release v1.0.6 enables alternatively using = instead of == for equality operation. 2016-07-11: Release v1.0.5 undoes vendoring of lldb. QL now uses stable lldb (github.com/cznic/lldb). 2016-07-06: Release v1.0.4 fixes a panic when closing the WAL file. 2016-04-03: Release v1.0.3 fixes a data race. 2016-03-23: Release v1.0.2 vendors github.com/cznic/exp/lldb and github.com/camlistore/go4/lock. 2016-03-17: Release v1.0.1 adjusts for latest goyacc. Parser error messages are improved and changed, but their exact form is not considered a API change. 2016-03-05: The current version has been tagged v1.0.0. 2015-06-15: To improve compatibility with other SQL implementations, the count built-in aggregate function now accepts * as its argument. 2015-05-29: The execution planner was rewritten from scratch. It should use indices in all places where they were used before plus in some additional situations. It is possible to investigate the plan using the newly added EXPLAIN statement. The QL tool is handy for such analysis. If the planner would have used an index, but no such exists, the plan includes hints in form of copy/paste ready CREATE INDEX statements. The planner is still quite simple and a lot of work on it is yet ahead. You can help this process by filling an issue with a schema and query which fails to use an index or indices when it should, in your opinion. Bonus points for including output of `ql 'explain <query>'`. 2015-05-09: The grammar of the CREATE INDEX statement now accepts an expression list instead of a single expression, which was further limited to just a column name or the built-in id(). As a side effect, composite indices are now functional. However, the values in the expression-list style index are not yet used by other statements or the statement/query planner. The composite index is useful while having UNIQUE clause to check for semantically duplicate rows before they get added to the table or when such a row is mutated using the UPDATE statement and the expression-list style index tuple of the row is thus recomputed. 2015-05-02: The Schema field of table __Table now correctly reflects any column constraints and/or defaults. Also, the (*DB).Info method now has that information provided in new ColumInfo fields NotNull, Constraint and Default. 2015-04-20: Added support for {LEFT,RIGHT,FULL} [OUTER] JOIN. 2015-04-18: Column definitions can now have constraints and defaults. Details are discussed in the "Constraints and defaults" chapter below the CREATE TABLE statement documentation. 2015-03-06: New built-in functions formatFloat and formatInt. Thanks urandom! (https://github.com/urandom) 2015-02-16: IN predicate now accepts a SELECT statement. See the updated "Predicates" section. 2015-01-17: Logical operators || and && have now alternative spellings: OR and AND (case insensitive). AND was a keyword before, but OR is a new one. This can possibly break existing queries. For the record, it's a good idea to not use any name appearing in, for example, [7] in your queries as the list of QL's keywords may expand for gaining better compatibility with existing SQL "standards". 2015-01-12: ACID guarantees were tightened at the cost of performance in some cases. The write collecting window mechanism, a formerly used implementation detail, was removed. Inserting rows one by one in a transaction is now slow. I mean very slow. Try to avoid inserting single rows in a transaction. Instead, whenever possible, perform batch updates of tens to, say thousands of rows in a single transaction. See also: http://www.sqlite.org/faq.html#q19, the discussed synchronization principles involved are the same as for QL, modulo minor details. Note: A side effect is that closing a DB before exiting an application, both for the Go API and through database/sql driver, is no more required, strictly speaking. Beware that exiting an application while there is an open (uncommitted) transaction in progress means losing the transaction data. However, the DB will not become corrupted because of not closing it. Nor that was the case before, but formerly failing to close a DB could have resulted in losing the data of the last transaction. 2014-09-21: id() now optionally accepts a single argument - a table name. 2014-09-01: Added the DB.Flush() method and the LIKE pattern matching predicate. 2014-08-08: The built in functions max and min now accept also time values. Thanks opennota! (https://github.com/opennota) 2014-06-05: RecordSet interface extended by new methods FirstRow and Rows. 2014-06-02: Indices on id() are now used by SELECT statements. 2014-05-07: Introduction of Marshal, Schema, Unmarshal. 2014-04-15: Added optional IF NOT EXISTS clause to CREATE INDEX and optional IF EXISTS clause to DROP INDEX. 2014-04-12: The column Unique in the virtual table __Index was renamed to IsUnique because the old name is a keyword. Unfortunately, this is a breaking change, sorry. 2014-04-11: Introduction of LIMIT, OFFSET. 2014-04-10: Introduction of query rewriting. 2014-04-07: Introduction of indices. QL imports zappy[8], a block-based compressor, which speeds up its performance by using a C version of the compression/decompression algorithms. If a CGO-free (pure Go) version of QL, or an app using QL, is required, please include 'purego' in the -tags option of go {build,get,install}. For example: If zappy was installed before installing QL, it might be necessary to rebuild zappy first (or rebuild QL with all its dependencies using the -a option): The syntax is specified using Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF) Lower-case production names are used to identify lexical tokens. Non-terminals are in CamelCase. Lexical tokens are enclosed in double quotes "" or back quotes “. The form a … b represents the set of characters from a through b as alternatives. The horizontal ellipsis … is also used elsewhere in the spec to informally denote various enumerations or code snippets that are not further specified. QL source code is Unicode text encoded in UTF-8. The text is not canonicalized, so a single accented code point is distinct from the same character constructed from combining an accent and a letter; those are treated as two code points. For simplicity, this document will use the unqualified term character to refer to a Unicode code point in the source text. Each code point is distinct; for instance, upper and lower case letters are different characters. Implementation restriction: For compatibility with other tools, the parser may disallow the NUL character (U+0000) in the statement. Implementation restriction: A byte order mark is disallowed anywhere in QL statements. The following terms are used to denote specific character classes The underscore character _ (U+005F) is considered a letter. Lexical elements are comments, tokens, identifiers, keywords, operators and delimiters, integer, floating-point, imaginary, rune and string literals and QL parameters. Line comments start with the character sequence // or -- and stop at the end of the line. A line comment acts like a space. General comments start with the character sequence /* and continue through the character sequence */. A general comment acts like a space. Comments do not nest. Tokens form the vocabulary of QL. There are four classes: identifiers, keywords, operators and delimiters, and literals. White space, formed from spaces (U+0020), horizontal tabs (U+0009), carriage returns (U+000D), and newlines (U+000A), is ignored except as it separates tokens that would otherwise combine into a single token. The formal grammar uses semicolons ";" as separators of QL statements. A single QL statement or the last QL statement in a list of statements can have an optional semicolon terminator. (Actually a separator from the following empty statement.) Identifiers name entities such as tables or record set columns. An identifier is a sequence of one or more letters and digits. The first character in an identifier must be a letter. For example No identifiers are predeclared, however note that no keyword can be used as an identifier. Identifiers starting with two underscores are used for meta data virtual tables names. For forward compatibility, users should generally avoid using any identifiers starting with two underscores. For example The following keywords are reserved and may not be used as identifiers. Keywords are not case sensitive. The following character sequences represent operators, delimiters, and other special tokens Operators consisting of more than one character are referred to by names in the rest of the documentation An integer literal is a sequence of digits representing an integer constant. An optional prefix sets a non-decimal base: 0 for octal, 0x or 0X for hexadecimal. In hexadecimal literals, letters a-f and A-F represent values 10 through 15. For example A floating-point literal is a decimal representation of a floating-point constant. It has an integer part, a decimal point, a fractional part, and an exponent part. The integer and fractional part comprise decimal digits; the exponent part is an e or E followed by an optionally signed decimal exponent. One of the integer part or the fractional part may be elided; one of the decimal point or the exponent may be elided. For example An imaginary literal is a decimal representation of the imaginary part of a complex constant. It consists of a floating-point literal or decimal integer followed by the lower-case letter i. For example A rune literal represents a rune constant, an integer value identifying a Unicode code point. A rune literal is expressed as one or more characters enclosed in single quotes. Within the quotes, any character may appear except single quote and newline. A single quoted character represents the Unicode value of the character itself, while multi-character sequences beginning with a backslash encode values in various formats. The simplest form represents the single character within the quotes; since QL statements are Unicode characters encoded in UTF-8, multiple UTF-8-encoded bytes may represent a single integer value. For instance, the literal 'a' holds a single byte representing a literal a, Unicode U+0061, value 0x61, while 'ä' holds two bytes (0xc3 0xa4) representing a literal a-dieresis, U+00E4, value 0xe4. Several backslash escapes allow arbitrary values to be encoded as ASCII text. There are four ways to represent the integer value as a numeric constant: \x followed by exactly two hexadecimal digits; \u followed by exactly four hexadecimal digits; \U followed by exactly eight hexadecimal digits, and a plain backslash \ followed by exactly three octal digits. In each case the value of the literal is the value represented by the digits in the corresponding base. Although these representations all result in an integer, they have different valid ranges. Octal escapes must represent a value between 0 and 255 inclusive. Hexadecimal escapes satisfy this condition by construction. The escapes \u and \U represent Unicode code points so within them some values are illegal, in particular those above 0x10FFFF and surrogate halves. After a backslash, certain single-character escapes represent special values All other sequences starting with a backslash are illegal inside rune literals. For example A string literal represents a string constant obtained from concatenating a sequence of characters. There are two forms: raw string literals and interpreted string literals. Raw string literals are character sequences between back quotes “. Within the quotes, any character is legal except back quote. The value of a raw string literal is the string composed of the uninterpreted (implicitly UTF-8-encoded) characters between the quotes; in particular, backslashes have no special meaning and the string may contain newlines. Carriage returns inside raw string literals are discarded from the raw string value. Interpreted string literals are character sequences between double quotes "". The text between the quotes, which may not contain newlines, forms the value of the literal, with backslash escapes interpreted as they are in rune literals (except that \' is illegal and \" is legal), with the same restrictions. The three-digit octal (\nnn) and two-digit hexadecimal (\xnn) escapes represent individual bytes of the resulting string; all other escapes represent the (possibly multi-byte) UTF-8 encoding of individual characters. Thus inside a string literal \377 and \xFF represent a single byte of value 0xFF=255, while ÿ, \u00FF, \U000000FF and \xc3\xbf represent the two bytes 0xc3 0xbf of the UTF-8 encoding of character U+00FF. For example These examples all represent the same string If the statement source represents a character as two code points, such as a combining form involving an accent and a letter, the result will be an error if placed in a rune literal (it is not a single code point), and will appear as two code points if placed in a string literal. Literals are assigned their values from the respective text representation at "compile" (parse) time. QL parameters provide the same functionality as literals, but their value is assigned at execution time from an expression list passed to DB.Run or DB.Execute. Using '?' or '$' is completely equivalent. For example Keywords 'false' and 'true' (not case sensitive) represent the two possible constant values of type bool (also not case sensitive). Keyword 'NULL' (not case sensitive) represents an untyped constant which is assignable to any type. NULL is distinct from any other value of any type. A type determines the set of values and operations specific to values of that type. A type is specified by a type name. Named instances of the boolean, numeric, and string types are keywords. The names are not case sensitive. Note: The blob type is exchanged between the back end and the API as []byte. On 32 bit platforms this limits the size which the implementation can handle to 2G. A boolean type represents the set of Boolean truth values denoted by the predeclared constants true and false. The predeclared boolean type is bool. A duration type represents the elapsed time between two instants as an int64 nanosecond count. The representation limits the largest representable duration to approximately 290 years. A numeric type represents sets of integer or floating-point values. The predeclared architecture-independent numeric types are The value of an n-bit integer is n bits wide and represented using two's complement arithmetic. Conversions are required when different numeric types are mixed in an expression or assignment. A string type represents the set of string values. A string value is a (possibly empty) sequence of bytes. The case insensitive keyword for the string type is 'string'. The length of a string (its size in bytes) can be discovered using the built-in function len. A time type represents an instant in time with nanosecond precision. Each time has associated with it a location, consulted when computing the presentation form of the time. The following functions are implicitly declared An expression specifies the computation of a value by applying operators and functions to operands. Operands denote the elementary values in an expression. An operand may be a literal, a (possibly qualified) identifier denoting a constant or a function or a table/record set column, or a parenthesized expression. A qualified identifier is an identifier qualified with a table/record set name prefix. For example Primary expression are the operands for unary and binary expressions. For example A primary expression of the form denotes the element of a string indexed by x. Its type is byte. The value x is called the index. The following rules apply - The index x must be of integer type except bigint or duration; it is in range if 0 <= x < len(s), otherwise it is out of range. - A constant index must be non-negative and representable by a value of type int. - A constant index must be in range if the string a is a literal. - If x is out of range at run time, a run-time error occurs. - s[x] is the byte at index x and the type of s[x] is byte. If s is NULL or x is NULL then the result is NULL. Otherwise s[x] is illegal. For a string, the primary expression constructs a substring. The indices low and high select which elements appear in the result. The result has indices starting at 0 and length equal to high - low. For convenience, any of the indices may be omitted. A missing low index defaults to zero; a missing high index defaults to the length of the sliced operand The indices low and high are in range if 0 <= low <= high <= len(a), otherwise they are out of range. A constant index must be non-negative and representable by a value of type int. If both indices are constant, they must satisfy low <= high. If the indices are out of range at run time, a run-time error occurs. Integer values of type bigint or duration cannot be used as indices. If s is NULL the result is NULL. If low or high is not omitted and is NULL then the result is NULL. Given an identifier f denoting a predeclared function, calls f with arguments a1, a2, … an. Arguments are evaluated before the function is called. The type of the expression is the result type of f. In a function call, the function value and arguments are evaluated in the usual order. After they are evaluated, the parameters of the call are passed by value to the function and the called function begins execution. The return value of the function is passed by value when the function returns. Calling an undefined function causes a compile-time error. Operators combine operands into expressions. Comparisons are discussed elsewhere. For other binary operators, the operand types must be identical unless the operation involves shifts or untyped constants. For operations involving constants only, see the section on constant expressions. Except for shift operations, if one operand is an untyped constant and the other operand is not, the constant is converted to the type of the other operand. The right operand in a shift expression must have unsigned integer type or be an untyped constant that can be converted to unsigned integer type. If the left operand of a non-constant shift expression is an untyped constant, the type of the constant is what it would be if the shift expression were replaced by its left operand alone. Expressions of the form yield a boolean value true if expr2, a regular expression, matches expr1 (see also [6]). Both expression must be of type string. If any one of the expressions is NULL the result is NULL. Predicates are special form expressions having a boolean result type. Expressions of the form are equivalent, including NULL handling, to The types of involved expressions must be comparable as defined in "Comparison operators". Another form of the IN predicate creates the expression list from a result of a SelectStmt. The SelectStmt must select only one column. The produced expression list is resource limited by the memory available to the process. NULL values produced by the SelectStmt are ignored, but if all records of the SelectStmt are NULL the predicate yields NULL. The select statement is evaluated only once. If the type of expr is not the same as the type of the field returned by the SelectStmt then the set operation yields false. The type of the column returned by the SelectStmt must be one of the simple (non blob-like) types: Expressions of the form are equivalent, including NULL handling, to The types of involved expressions must be ordered as defined in "Comparison operators". Expressions of the form yield a boolean value true if expr does not have a specific type (case A) or if expr has a specific type (case B). In other cases the result is a boolean value false. Unary operators have the highest precedence. There are five precedence levels for binary operators. Multiplication operators bind strongest, followed by addition operators, comparison operators, && (logical AND), and finally || (logical OR) Binary operators of the same precedence associate from left to right. For instance, x / y * z is the same as (x / y) * z. Note that the operator precedence is reflected explicitly by the grammar. Arithmetic operators apply to numeric values and yield a result of the same type as the first operand. The four standard arithmetic operators (+, -, *, /) apply to integer, rational, floating-point, and complex types; + also applies to strings; +,- also applies to times. All other arithmetic operators apply to integers only. sum integers, rationals, floats, complex values, strings difference integers, rationals, floats, complex values, times product integers, rationals, floats, complex values / quotient integers, rationals, floats, complex values % remainder integers & bitwise AND integers | bitwise OR integers ^ bitwise XOR integers &^ bit clear (AND NOT) integers << left shift integer << unsigned integer >> right shift integer >> unsigned integer Strings can be concatenated using the + operator String addition creates a new string by concatenating the operands. A value of type duration can be added to or subtracted from a value of type time. Times can subtracted from each other producing a value of type duration. For two integer values x and y, the integer quotient q = x / y and remainder r = x % y satisfy the following relationships with x / y truncated towards zero ("truncated division"). As an exception to this rule, if the dividend x is the most negative value for the int type of x, the quotient q = x / -1 is equal to x (and r = 0). If the divisor is a constant expression, it must not be zero. If the divisor is zero at run time, a run-time error occurs. If the dividend is non-negative and the divisor is a constant power of 2, the division may be replaced by a right shift, and computing the remainder may be replaced by a bitwise AND operation The shift operators shift the left operand by the shift count specified by the right operand. They implement arithmetic shifts if the left operand is a signed integer and logical shifts if it is an unsigned integer. There is no upper limit on the shift count. Shifts behave as if the left operand is shifted n times by 1 for a shift count of n. As a result, x << 1 is the same as x*2 and x >> 1 is the same as x/2 but truncated towards negative infinity. For integer operands, the unary operators +, -, and ^ are defined as follows For floating-point and complex numbers, +x is the same as x, while -x is the negation of x. The result of a floating-point or complex division by zero is not specified beyond the IEEE-754 standard; whether a run-time error occurs is implementation-specific. Whenever any operand of any arithmetic operation, unary or binary, is NULL, as well as in the case of the string concatenating operation, the result is NULL. For unsigned integer values, the operations +, -, *, and << are computed modulo 2n, where n is the bit width of the unsigned integer's type. Loosely speaking, these unsigned integer operations discard high bits upon overflow, and expressions may rely on “wrap around”. For signed integers with a finite bit width, the operations +, -, *, and << may legally overflow and the resulting value exists and is deterministically defined by the signed integer representation, the operation, and its operands. No exception is raised as a result of overflow. An evaluator may not optimize an expression under the assumption that overflow does not occur. For instance, it may not assume that x < x + 1 is always true. Integers of type bigint and rationals do not overflow but their handling is limited by the memory resources available to the program. Comparison operators compare two operands and yield a boolean value. In any comparison, the first operand must be of same type as is the second operand, or vice versa. The equality operators == and != apply to operands that are comparable. The ordering operators <, <=, >, and >= apply to operands that are ordered. These terms and the result of the comparisons are defined as follows - Boolean values are comparable. Two boolean values are equal if they are either both true or both false. - Complex values are comparable. Two complex values u and v are equal if both real(u) == real(v) and imag(u) == imag(v). - Integer values are comparable and ordered, in the usual way. Note that durations are integers. - Floating point values are comparable and ordered, as defined by the IEEE-754 standard. - Rational values are comparable and ordered, in the usual way. - String and Blob values are comparable and ordered, lexically byte-wise. - Time values are comparable and ordered. Whenever any operand of any comparison operation is NULL, the result is NULL. Note that slices are always of type string. Logical operators apply to boolean values and yield a boolean result. The right operand is evaluated conditionally. The truth tables for logical operations with NULL values Conversions are expressions of the form T(x) where T is a type and x is an expression that can be converted to type T. A constant value x can be converted to type T in any of these cases: - x is representable by a value of type T. - x is a floating-point constant, T is a floating-point type, and x is representable by a value of type T after rounding using IEEE 754 round-to-even rules. The constant T(x) is the rounded value. - x is an integer constant and T is a string type. The same rule as for non-constant x applies in this case. Converting a constant yields a typed constant as result. A non-constant value x can be converted to type T in any of these cases: - x has type T. - x's type and T are both integer or floating point types. - x's type and T are both complex types. - x is an integer, except bigint or duration, and T is a string type. Specific rules apply to (non-constant) conversions between numeric types or to and from a string type. These conversions may change the representation of x and incur a run-time cost. All other conversions only change the type but not the representation of x. A conversion of NULL to any type yields NULL. For the conversion of non-constant numeric values, the following rules apply 1. When converting between integer types, if the value is a signed integer, it is sign extended to implicit infinite precision; otherwise it is zero extended. It is then truncated to fit in the result type's size. For example, if v == uint16(0x10F0), then uint32(int8(v)) == 0xFFFFFFF0. The conversion always yields a valid value; there is no indication of overflow. 2. When converting a floating-point number to an integer, the fraction is discarded (truncation towards zero). 3. When converting an integer or floating-point number to a floating-point type, or a complex number to another complex type, the result value is rounded to the precision specified by the destination type. For instance, the value of a variable x of type float32 may be stored using additional precision beyond that of an IEEE-754 32-bit number, but float32(x) represents the result of rounding x's value to 32-bit precision. Similarly, x + 0.1 may use more than 32 bits of precision, but float32(x + 0.1) does not. In all non-constant conversions involving floating-point or complex values, if the result type cannot represent the value the conversion succeeds but the result value is implementation-dependent. 1. Converting a signed or unsigned integer value to a string type yields a string containing the UTF-8 representation of the integer. Values outside the range of valid Unicode code points are converted to "\uFFFD". 2. Converting a blob to a string type yields a string whose successive bytes are the elements of the blob. 3. Converting a value of a string type to a blob yields a blob whose successive elements are the bytes of the string. 4. Converting a value of a bigint type to a string yields a string containing the decimal decimal representation of the integer. 5. Converting a value of a string type to a bigint yields a bigint value containing the integer represented by the string value. A prefix of “0x” or “0X” selects base 16; the “0” prefix selects base 8, and a “0b” or “0B” prefix selects base 2. Otherwise the value is interpreted in base 10. An error occurs if the string value is not in any valid format. 6. Converting a value of a rational type to a string yields a string containing the decimal decimal representation of the rational in the form "a/b" (even if b == 1). 7. Converting a value of a string type to a bigrat yields a bigrat value containing the rational represented by the string value. The string can be given as a fraction "a/b" or as a floating-point number optionally followed by an exponent. An error occurs if the string value is not in any valid format. 8. Converting a value of a duration type to a string returns a string representing the duration in the form "72h3m0.5s". Leading zero units are omitted. As a special case, durations less than one second format using a smaller unit (milli-, micro-, or nanoseconds) to ensure that the leading digit is non-zero. The zero duration formats as 0, with no unit. 9. Converting a string value to a duration yields a duration represented by the string. A duration string is a possibly signed sequence of decimal numbers, each with optional fraction and a unit suffix, such as "300ms", "-1.5h" or "2h45m". Valid time units are "ns", "us" (or "µs"), "ms", "s", "m", "h". 10. Converting a time value to a string returns the time formatted using the format string When evaluating the operands of an expression or of function calls, operations are evaluated in lexical left-to-right order. For example, in the evaluation of the function calls and evaluation of c happen in the order h(), i(), j(), c. Floating-point operations within a single expression are evaluated according to the associativity of the operators. Explicit parentheses affect the evaluation by overriding the default associativity. In the expression x + (y + z) the addition y + z is performed before adding x. Statements control execution. The empty statement does nothing. Alter table statements modify existing tables. With the ADD clause it adds a new column to the table. The column must not exist. With the DROP clause it removes an existing column from a table. The column must exist and it must be not the only (last) column of the table. IOW, there cannot be a table with no columns. For example When adding a column to a table with existing data, the constraint clause of the ColumnDef cannot be used. Adding a constrained column to an empty table is fine. Begin transactions statements introduce a new transaction level. Every transaction level must be eventually balanced by exactly one of COMMIT or ROLLBACK statements. Note that when a transaction is roll-backed because of a statement failure then no explicit balancing of the respective BEGIN TRANSACTION is statement is required nor permitted. Failure to properly balance any opened transaction level may cause dead locks and/or lose of data updated in the uppermost opened but never properly closed transaction level. For example A database cannot be updated (mutated) outside of a transaction. Statements requiring a transaction A database is effectively read only outside of a transaction. Statements not requiring a transaction The commit statement closes the innermost transaction nesting level. If that's the outermost level then the updates to the DB made by the transaction are atomically made persistent. For example Create index statements create new indices. Index is a named projection of ordered values of a table column to the respective records. As a special case the id() of the record can be indexed. Index name must not be the same as any of the existing tables and it also cannot be the same as of any column name of the table the index is on. For example Now certain SELECT statements may use the indices to speed up joins and/or to speed up record set filtering when the WHERE clause is used; or the indices might be used to improve the performance when the ORDER BY clause is present. The UNIQUE modifier requires the indexed values tuple to be index-wise unique or have all values NULL. The optional IF NOT EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the index already exists. A simple index consists of only one expression which must be either a column name or the built-in id(). A more complex and more general index is one that consists of more than one expression or its single expression does not qualify as a simple index. In this case the type of all expressions in the list must be one of the non blob-like types. Note: Blob-like types are blob, bigint, bigrat, time and duration. Create table statements create new tables. A column definition declares the column name and type. Table names and column names are case sensitive. Neither a table or an index of the same name may exist in the DB. For example The optional IF NOT EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the table already exists. The optional constraint clause has two forms. The first one is found in many SQL dialects. This form prevents the data in column DepartmentName to be NULL. The second form allows an arbitrary boolean expression to be used to validate the column. If the value of the expression is true then the validation succeeded. If the value of the expression is false or NULL then the validation fails. If the value of the expression is not of type bool an error occurs. The optional DEFAULT clause is an expression which, if present, is substituted instead of a NULL value when the colum is assigned a value. Note that the constraint and/or default expressions may refer to other columns by name: When a table row is inserted by the INSERT INTO statement or when a table row is updated by the UPDATE statement, the order of operations is as follows: 1. The new values of the affected columns are set and the values of all the row columns become the named values which can be referred to in default expressions evaluated in step 2. 2. If any row column value is NULL and the DEFAULT clause is present in the column's definition, the default expression is evaluated and its value is set as the respective column value. 3. The values, potentially updated, of row columns become the named values which can be referred to in constraint expressions evaluated during step 4. 4. All row columns which definition has the constraint clause present will have that constraint checked. If any constraint violation is detected, the overall operation fails and no changes to the table are made. Delete from statements remove rows from a table, which must exist. For example If the WHERE clause is not present then all rows are removed and the statement is equivalent to the TRUNCATE TABLE statement. Drop index statements remove indices from the DB. The index must exist. For example The optional IF EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the index does not exist. Drop table statements remove tables from the DB. The table must exist. For example The optional IF EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the table does not exist. Insert into statements insert new rows into tables. New rows come from literal data, if using the VALUES clause, or are a result of select statement. In the later case the select statement is fully evaluated before the insertion of any rows is performed, allowing to insert values calculated from the same table rows are to be inserted into. If the ColumnNameList part is omitted then the number of values inserted in the row must be the same as are columns in the table. If the ColumnNameList part is present then the number of values per row must be same as the same number of column names. All other columns of the record are set to NULL. The type of the value assigned to a column must be the same as is the column's type or the value must be NULL. For example If any of the columns of the table were defined using the optional constraints clause or the optional defaults clause then those are processed on a per row basis. The details are discussed in the "Constraints and defaults" chapter below the CREATE TABLE statement documentation. Explain statement produces a recordset consisting of lines of text which describe the execution plan of a statement, if any. For example, the QL tool treats the explain statement specially and outputs the joined lines: The explanation may aid in uderstanding how a statement/query would be executed and if indices are used as expected - or which indices may possibly improve the statement performance. The create index statements above were directly copy/pasted in the terminal from the suggestions provided by the filter recordset pipeline part returned by the explain statement. If the statement has nothing special in its plan, the result is the original statement. To get an explanation of the select statement of the IN predicate, use the EXPLAIN statement with that particular select statement. The rollback statement closes the innermost transaction nesting level discarding any updates to the DB made by it. If that's the outermost level then the effects on the DB are as if the transaction never happened. For example The (temporary) record set from the last statement is returned and can be processed by the client. In this case the rollback is the same as 'DROP TABLE tmp;' but it can be a more complex operation. Select from statements produce recordsets. The optional DISTINCT modifier ensures all rows in the result recordset are unique. Either all of the resulting fields are returned ('*') or only those named in FieldList. RecordSetList is a list of table names or parenthesized select statements, optionally (re)named using the AS clause. The result can be filtered using a WhereClause and orderd by the OrderBy clause. For example If Recordset is a nested, parenthesized SelectStmt then it must be given a name using the AS clause if its field are to be accessible in expressions. A field is an named expression. Identifiers, not used as a type in conversion or a function name in the Call clause, denote names of (other) fields, values of which should be used in the expression. The expression can be named using the AS clause. If the AS clause is not present and the expression consists solely of a field name, then that field name is used as the name of the resulting field. Otherwise the field is unnamed. For example The SELECT statement can optionally enumerate the desired/resulting fields in a list. No two identical field names can appear in the list. When more than one record set is used in the FROM clause record set list, the result record set field names are rewritten to be qualified using the record set names. If a particular record set doesn't have a name, its respective fields became unnamed. The optional JOIN clause, for example is mostly equal to except that the rows from a which, when they appear in the cross join, never made expr to evaluate to true, are combined with a virtual row from b, containing all nulls, and added to the result set. For the RIGHT JOIN variant the discussed rules are used for rows from b not satisfying expr == true and the virtual, all-null row "comes" from a. The FULL JOIN adds the respective rows which would be otherwise provided by the separate executions of the LEFT JOIN and RIGHT JOIN variants. For more thorough OUTER JOIN discussion please see the Wikipedia article at [10]. Resultins rows of a SELECT statement can be optionally ordered by the ORDER BY clause. Collating proceeds by considering the expressions in the expression list left to right until a collating order is determined. Any possibly remaining expressions are not evaluated. All of the expression values must yield an ordered type or NULL. Ordered types are defined in "Comparison operators". Collating of elements having a NULL value is different compared to what the comparison operators yield in expression evaluation (NULL result instead of a boolean value). Below, T denotes a non NULL value of any QL type. NULL collates before any non NULL value (is considered smaller than T). Two NULLs have no collating order (are considered equal). The WHERE clause restricts records considered by some statements, like SELECT FROM, DELETE FROM, or UPDATE. It is an error if the expression evaluates to a non null value of non bool type. Another form of the WHERE clause is an existence predicate of a parenthesized select statement. The EXISTS form evaluates to true if the parenthesized SELECT statement produces a non empty record set. The NOT EXISTS form evaluates to true if the parenthesized SELECT statement produces an empty record set. The parenthesized SELECT statement is evaluated only once (TODO issue #159). The GROUP BY clause is used to project rows having common values into a smaller set of rows. For example Using the GROUP BY without any aggregate functions in the selected fields is in certain cases equal to using the DISTINCT modifier. The last two examples above produce the same resultsets. The optional OFFSET clause allows to ignore first N records. For example The above will produce only rows 11, 12, ... of the record set, if they exist. The value of the expression must a non negative integer, but not bigint or duration. The optional LIMIT clause allows to ignore all but first N records. For example The above will return at most the first 10 records of the record set. The value of the expression must a non negative integer, but not bigint or duration. The LIMIT and OFFSET clauses can be combined. For example Considering table t has, say 10 records, the above will produce only records 4 - 8. After returning record #8, no more result rows/records are computed. 1. The FROM clause is evaluated, producing a Cartesian product of its source record sets (tables or nested SELECT statements). 2. If present, the JOIN cluase is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation and the recordset specified by the JOIN clause. (... JOIN Recordset ON ...) 3. If present, the WHERE clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation. 4. If present, the GROUP BY clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 5. The SELECT field expressions are evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 6. If present, the DISTINCT modifier is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 7. If present, the ORDER BY clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 8. If present, the OFFSET clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). The offset expression is evaluated once for the first record produced by the previous evaluations. 9. If present, the LIMIT clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). The limit expression is evaluated once for the first record produced by the previous evaluations. Truncate table statements remove all records from a table. The table must exist. For example Update statements change values of fields in rows of a table. For example Note: The SET clause is optional. If any of the columns of the table were defined using the optional constraints clause or the optional defaults clause then those are processed on a per row basis. The details are discussed in the "Constraints and defaults" chapter below the CREATE TABLE statement documentation. To allow to query for DB meta data, there exist specially named tables, some of them being virtual. Note: Virtual system tables may have fake table-wise unique but meaningless and unstable record IDs. Do not apply the built-in id() to any system table. The table __Table lists all tables in the DB. The schema is The Schema column returns the statement to (re)create table Name. This table is virtual. The table __Colum lists all columns of all tables in the DB. The schema is The Ordinal column defines the 1-based index of the column in the record. This table is virtual. The table __Colum2 lists all columns of all tables in the DB which have the constraint NOT NULL or which have a constraint expression defined or which have a default expression defined. The schema is It's possible to obtain a consolidated recordset for all properties of all DB columns using The Name column is the column name in TableName. The table __Index lists all indices in the DB. The schema is The IsUnique columns reflects if the index was created using the optional UNIQUE clause. This table is virtual. Built-in functions are predeclared. The built-in aggregate function avg returns the average of values of an expression. Avg ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if avg is applied to an empty record set. The column values must be of a numeric type. The built-in function contains returns true if substr is within s. If any argument to contains is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in aggregate function count returns how many times an expression has a non NULL values or the number of rows in a record set. Note: count() returns 0 for an empty record set. For example Date returns the time corresponding to in the appropriate zone for that time in the given location. The month, day, hour, min, sec, and nsec values may be outside their usual ranges and will be normalized during the conversion. For example, October 32 converts to November 1. A daylight savings time transition skips or repeats times. For example, in the United States, March 13, 2011 2:15am never occurred, while November 6, 2011 1:15am occurred twice. In such cases, the choice of time zone, and therefore the time, is not well-defined. Date returns a time that is correct in one of the two zones involved in the transition, but it does not guarantee which. A location maps time instants to the zone in use at that time. Typically, the location represents the collection of time offsets in use in a geographical area, such as "CEST" and "CET" for central Europe. "local" represents the system's local time zone. "UTC" represents Universal Coordinated Time (UTC). The month specifies a month of the year (January = 1, ...). If any argument to date is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function day returns the day of the month specified by t. If the argument to day is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function formatTime returns a textual representation of the time value formatted according to layout, which defines the format by showing how the reference time, would be displayed if it were the value; it serves as an example of the desired output. The same display rules will then be applied to the time value. If any argument to formatTime is NULL the result is NULL. NOTE: The string value of the time zone, like "CET" or "ACDT", is dependent on the time zone of the machine the function is run on. For example, if the t value is in "CET", but the machine is in "ACDT", instead of "CET" the result is "+0100". This is the same what Go (time.Time).String() returns and in fact formatTime directly calls t.String(). returns on a machine in the CET time zone, but may return on a machine in the ACDT zone. The time value is in both cases the same so its ordering and comparing is correct. Only the display value can differ. The built-in functions formatFloat and formatInt format numbers to strings using go's number format functions in the `strconv` package. For all three functions, only the first argument is mandatory. The default values of the rest are shown in the examples. If the first argument is NULL, the result is NULL. returns returns returns Unlike the `strconv` equivalent, the formatInt function handles all integer types, both signed and unsigned. The built-in function hasPrefix tests whether the string s begins with prefix. If any argument to hasPrefix is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function hasSuffix tests whether the string s ends with suffix. If any argument to hasSuffix is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function hour returns the hour within the day specified by t, in the range [0, 23]. If the argument to hour is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function hours returns the duration as a floating point number of hours. If the argument to hours is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function id takes zero or one arguments. If no argument is provided, id() returns a table-unique automatically assigned numeric identifier of type int. Ids of deleted records are not reused unless the DB becomes completely empty (has no tables). For example If id() without arguments is called for a row which is not a table record then the result value is NULL. For example If id() has one argument it must be a table name of a table in a cross join. For example The built-in function len takes a string argument and returns the lentgh of the string in bytes. The expression len(s) is constant if s is a string constant. If the argument to len is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in aggregate function max returns the largest value of an expression in a record set. Max ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if max is applied to an empty record set. The expression values must be of an ordered type. For example The built-in aggregate function min returns the smallest value of an expression in a record set. Min ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if min is applied to an empty record set. For example The column values must be of an ordered type. The built-in function minute returns the minute offset within the hour specified by t, in the range [0, 59]. If the argument to minute is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function minutes returns the duration as a floating point number of minutes. If the argument to minutes is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function month returns the month of the year specified by t (January = 1, ...). If the argument to month is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function nanosecond returns the nanosecond offset within the second specified by t, in the range [0, 999999999]. If the argument to nanosecond is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function nanoseconds returns the duration as an integer nanosecond count. If the argument to nanoseconds is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function now returns the current local time. The built-in function parseTime parses a formatted string and returns the time value it represents. The layout defines the format by showing how the reference time, would be interpreted if it were the value; it serves as an example of the input format. The same interpretation will then be made to the input string. Elements omitted from the value are assumed to be zero or, when zero is impossible, one, so parsing "3:04pm" returns the time corresponding to Jan 1, year 0, 15:04:00 UTC (note that because the year is 0, this time is before the zero Time). Years must be in the range 0000..9999. The day of the week is checked for syntax but it is otherwise ignored. In the absence of a time zone indicator, parseTime returns a time in UTC. When parsing a time with a zone offset like -0700, if the offset corresponds to a time zone used by the current location, then parseTime uses that location and zone in the returned time. Otherwise it records the time as being in a fabricated location with time fixed at the given zone offset. When parsing a time with a zone abbreviation like MST, if the zone abbreviation has a defined offset in the current location, then that offset is used. The zone abbreviation "UTC" is recognized as UTC regardless of location. If the zone abbreviation is unknown, Parse records the time as being in a fabricated location with the given zone abbreviation and a zero offset. This choice means that such a time can be parses and reformatted with the same layout losslessly, but the exact instant used in the representation will differ by the actual zone offset. To avoid such problems, prefer time layouts that use a numeric zone offset. If any argument to parseTime is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function second returns the second offset within the minute specified by t, in the range [0, 59]. If the argument to second is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function seconds returns the duration as a floating point number of seconds. If the argument to seconds is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function since returns the time elapsed since t. It is shorthand for now()-t. If the argument to since is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in aggregate function sum returns the sum of values of an expression for all rows of a record set. Sum ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if sum is applied to an empty record set. The column values must be of a numeric type. The built-in function timeIn returns t with the location information set to loc. For discussion of the loc argument please see date(). If any argument to timeIn is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function weekday returns the day of the week specified by t. Sunday == 0, Monday == 1, ... If the argument to weekday is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function year returns the year in which t occurs. If the argument to year is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function yearDay returns the day of the year specified by t, in the range [1,365] for non-leap years, and [1,366] in leap years. If the argument to yearDay is NULL the result is NULL. Three functions assemble and disassemble complex numbers. The built-in function complex constructs a complex value from a floating-point real and imaginary part, while real and imag extract the real and imaginary parts of a complex value. The type of the arguments and return value correspond. For complex, the two arguments must be of the same floating-point type and the return type is the complex type with the corresponding floating-point constituents: complex64 for float32, complex128 for float64. The real and imag functions together form the inverse, so for a complex value z, z == complex(real(z), imag(z)). If the operands of these functions are all constants, the return value is a constant. If any argument to any of complex, real, imag functions is NULL the result is NULL. For the numeric types, the following sizes are guaranteed Portions of this specification page are modifications based on work[2] created and shared by Google[3] and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License[4]. This specification is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, and code is licensed under a BSD license[5]. Links from the above documentation This section is not part of the specification. WARNING: The implementation of indices is new and it surely needs more time to become mature. Indices are used currently used only by the WHERE clause. The following expression patterns of 'WHERE expression' are recognized and trigger index use. The relOp is one of the relation operators <, <=, ==, >=, >. For the equality operator both operands must be of comparable types. For all other operators both operands must be of ordered types. The constant expression is a compile time constant expression. Some constant folding is still a TODO. Parameter is a QL parameter ($1 etc.). Consider tables t and u, both with an indexed field f. The WHERE expression doesn't comply with the above simple detected cases. However, such query is now automatically rewritten to which will use both of the indices. The impact of using the indices can be substantial (cf. BenchmarkCrossJoin*) if the resulting rows have low "selectivity", ie. only few rows from both tables are selected by the respective WHERE filtering. Note: Existing QL DBs can be used and indices can be added to them. However, once any indices are present in the DB, the old QL versions cannot work with such DB anymore. Running a benchmark with -v (-test.v) outputs information about the scale used to report records/s and a brief description of the benchmark. For example Running the full suite of benchmarks takes a lot of time. Use the -timeout flag to avoid them being killed after the default time limit (10 minutes).
Package ql implements a pure Go embedded SQL database engine. Builder results available at QL is a member of the SQL family of languages. It is less complex and less powerful than SQL (whichever specification SQL is considered to be). 2020-12-10: sql/database driver now supports url parameter removeemptywal=N which has the same semantics as passing RemoveEmptyWAL = N != 0 to OpenFile options. 2020-11-09: Add IF NOT EXISTS support for the INSERT INTO statement. Add IsDuplicateUniqueIndexError function. 2018-11-04: Back end file format V2 is now released. To use the new format for newly created databases set the FileFormat field in *Options passed to OpenFile to value 2 or use the driver named "ql2" instead of "ql". - Both the old and new driver will properly open and use, read and write the old (V1) or new file (V2) format of an existing database. - V1 format has a record size limit of ~64 kB. V2 format record size limit is math.MaxInt32. - V1 format uncommitted transaction size is limited by memory resources. V2 format uncommitted transaction is limited by free disk space. - A direct consequence of the previous is that small transactions perform better using V1 format and big transactions perform better using V2 format. - V2 format uses substantially less memory. 2018-08-02: Release v1.2.0 adds initial support for Go modules. 2017-01-10: Release v1.1.0 fixes some bugs and adds a configurable WAL headroom. 2016-07-29: Release v1.0.6 enables alternatively using = instead of == for equality operation. 2016-07-11: Release v1.0.5 undoes vendoring of lldb. QL now uses stable lldb (modernc.org/lldb). 2016-07-06: Release v1.0.4 fixes a panic when closing the WAL file. 2016-04-03: Release v1.0.3 fixes a data race. 2016-03-23: Release v1.0.2 vendors gitlab.com/cznic/exp/lldb and github.com/camlistore/go4/lock. 2016-03-17: Release v1.0.1 adjusts for latest goyacc. Parser error messages are improved and changed, but their exact form is not considered a API change. 2016-03-05: The current version has been tagged v1.0.0. 2015-06-15: To improve compatibility with other SQL implementations, the count built-in aggregate function now accepts * as its argument. 2015-05-29: The execution planner was rewritten from scratch. It should use indices in all places where they were used before plus in some additional situations. It is possible to investigate the plan using the newly added EXPLAIN statement. The QL tool is handy for such analysis. If the planner would have used an index, but no such exists, the plan includes hints in form of copy/paste ready CREATE INDEX statements. The planner is still quite simple and a lot of work on it is yet ahead. You can help this process by filling an issue with a schema and query which fails to use an index or indices when it should, in your opinion. Bonus points for including output of `ql 'explain <query>'`. 2015-05-09: The grammar of the CREATE INDEX statement now accepts an expression list instead of a single expression, which was further limited to just a column name or the built-in id(). As a side effect, composite indices are now functional. However, the values in the expression-list style index are not yet used by other statements or the statement/query planner. The composite index is useful while having UNIQUE clause to check for semantically duplicate rows before they get added to the table or when such a row is mutated using the UPDATE statement and the expression-list style index tuple of the row is thus recomputed. 2015-05-02: The Schema field of table __Table now correctly reflects any column constraints and/or defaults. Also, the (*DB).Info method now has that information provided in new ColumInfo fields NotNull, Constraint and Default. 2015-04-20: Added support for {LEFT,RIGHT,FULL} [OUTER] JOIN. 2015-04-18: Column definitions can now have constraints and defaults. Details are discussed in the "Constraints and defaults" chapter below the CREATE TABLE statement documentation. 2015-03-06: New built-in functions formatFloat and formatInt. Thanks urandom! (https://github.com/urandom) 2015-02-16: IN predicate now accepts a SELECT statement. See the updated "Predicates" section. 2015-01-17: Logical operators || and && have now alternative spellings: OR and AND (case insensitive). AND was a keyword before, but OR is a new one. This can possibly break existing queries. For the record, it's a good idea to not use any name appearing in, for example, [7] in your queries as the list of QL's keywords may expand for gaining better compatibility with existing SQL "standards". 2015-01-12: ACID guarantees were tightened at the cost of performance in some cases. The write collecting window mechanism, a formerly used implementation detail, was removed. Inserting rows one by one in a transaction is now slow. I mean very slow. Try to avoid inserting single rows in a transaction. Instead, whenever possible, perform batch updates of tens to, say thousands of rows in a single transaction. See also: http://www.sqlite.org/faq.html#q19, the discussed synchronization principles involved are the same as for QL, modulo minor details. Note: A side effect is that closing a DB before exiting an application, both for the Go API and through database/sql driver, is no more required, strictly speaking. Beware that exiting an application while there is an open (uncommitted) transaction in progress means losing the transaction data. However, the DB will not become corrupted because of not closing it. Nor that was the case before, but formerly failing to close a DB could have resulted in losing the data of the last transaction. 2014-09-21: id() now optionally accepts a single argument - a table name. 2014-09-01: Added the DB.Flush() method and the LIKE pattern matching predicate. 2014-08-08: The built in functions max and min now accept also time values. Thanks opennota! (https://github.com/opennota) 2014-06-05: RecordSet interface extended by new methods FirstRow and Rows. 2014-06-02: Indices on id() are now used by SELECT statements. 2014-05-07: Introduction of Marshal, Schema, Unmarshal. 2014-04-15: Added optional IF NOT EXISTS clause to CREATE INDEX and optional IF EXISTS clause to DROP INDEX. 2014-04-12: The column Unique in the virtual table __Index was renamed to IsUnique because the old name is a keyword. Unfortunately, this is a breaking change, sorry. 2014-04-11: Introduction of LIMIT, OFFSET. 2014-04-10: Introduction of query rewriting. 2014-04-07: Introduction of indices. QL imports zappy[8], a block-based compressor, which speeds up its performance by using a C version of the compression/decompression algorithms. If a CGO-free (pure Go) version of QL, or an app using QL, is required, please include 'purego' in the -tags option of go {build,get,install}. For example: If zappy was installed before installing QL, it might be necessary to rebuild zappy first (or rebuild QL with all its dependencies using the -a option): The syntax is specified using Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF) Lower-case production names are used to identify lexical tokens. Non-terminals are in CamelCase. Lexical tokens are enclosed in double quotes "" or back quotes “. The form a … b represents the set of characters from a through b as alternatives. The horizontal ellipsis … is also used elsewhere in the spec to informally denote various enumerations or code snippets that are not further specified. QL source code is Unicode text encoded in UTF-8. The text is not canonicalized, so a single accented code point is distinct from the same character constructed from combining an accent and a letter; those are treated as two code points. For simplicity, this document will use the unqualified term character to refer to a Unicode code point in the source text. Each code point is distinct; for instance, upper and lower case letters are different characters. Implementation restriction: For compatibility with other tools, the parser may disallow the NUL character (U+0000) in the statement. Implementation restriction: A byte order mark is disallowed anywhere in QL statements. The following terms are used to denote specific character classes The underscore character _ (U+005F) is considered a letter. Lexical elements are comments, tokens, identifiers, keywords, operators and delimiters, integer, floating-point, imaginary, rune and string literals and QL parameters. Line comments start with the character sequence // or -- and stop at the end of the line. A line comment acts like a space. General comments start with the character sequence /* and continue through the character sequence */. A general comment acts like a space. Comments do not nest. Tokens form the vocabulary of QL. There are four classes: identifiers, keywords, operators and delimiters, and literals. White space, formed from spaces (U+0020), horizontal tabs (U+0009), carriage returns (U+000D), and newlines (U+000A), is ignored except as it separates tokens that would otherwise combine into a single token. The formal grammar uses semicolons ";" as separators of QL statements. A single QL statement or the last QL statement in a list of statements can have an optional semicolon terminator. (Actually a separator from the following empty statement.) Identifiers name entities such as tables or record set columns. There are two kinds of identifiers, normal idententifiers and quoted identifiers. An normal identifier is a sequence of one or more letters and digits. The first character in an identifier must be a letter. For example A quoted identifier is a string of any charaters between guillmets «». Quoted identifiers allow QL key words or phrases with spaces to be used as identifiers. The guillemets were chosen because QL already uses double quotes, single quotes, and backticks for other quoting purposes. «TRANSACTION» «duration» «lovely stories» No identifiers are predeclared, however note that no keyword can be used as a normal identifier. Identifiers starting with two underscores are used for meta data virtual tables names. For forward compatibility, users should generally avoid using any identifiers starting with two underscores. For example The following keywords are reserved and may not be used as identifiers. Keywords are not case sensitive. The following character sequences represent operators, delimiters, and other special tokens Operators consisting of more than one character are referred to by names in the rest of the documentation An integer literal is a sequence of digits representing an integer constant. An optional prefix sets a non-decimal base: 0 for octal, 0x or 0X for hexadecimal. In hexadecimal literals, letters a-f and A-F represent values 10 through 15. For example A floating-point literal is a decimal representation of a floating-point constant. It has an integer part, a decimal point, a fractional part, and an exponent part. The integer and fractional part comprise decimal digits; the exponent part is an e or E followed by an optionally signed decimal exponent. One of the integer part or the fractional part may be elided; one of the decimal point or the exponent may be elided. For example An imaginary literal is a decimal representation of the imaginary part of a complex constant. It consists of a floating-point literal or decimal integer followed by the lower-case letter i. For example A rune literal represents a rune constant, an integer value identifying a Unicode code point. A rune literal is expressed as one or more characters enclosed in single quotes. Within the quotes, any character may appear except single quote and newline. A single quoted character represents the Unicode value of the character itself, while multi-character sequences beginning with a backslash encode values in various formats. The simplest form represents the single character within the quotes; since QL statements are Unicode characters encoded in UTF-8, multiple UTF-8-encoded bytes may represent a single integer value. For instance, the literal 'a' holds a single byte representing a literal a, Unicode U+0061, value 0x61, while 'ä' holds two bytes (0xc3 0xa4) representing a literal a-dieresis, U+00E4, value 0xe4. Several backslash escapes allow arbitrary values to be encoded as ASCII text. There are four ways to represent the integer value as a numeric constant: \x followed by exactly two hexadecimal digits; \u followed by exactly four hexadecimal digits; \U followed by exactly eight hexadecimal digits, and a plain backslash \ followed by exactly three octal digits. In each case the value of the literal is the value represented by the digits in the corresponding base. Although these representations all result in an integer, they have different valid ranges. Octal escapes must represent a value between 0 and 255 inclusive. Hexadecimal escapes satisfy this condition by construction. The escapes \u and \U represent Unicode code points so within them some values are illegal, in particular those above 0x10FFFF and surrogate halves. After a backslash, certain single-character escapes represent special values All other sequences starting with a backslash are illegal inside rune literals. For example A string literal represents a string constant obtained from concatenating a sequence of characters. There are two forms: raw string literals and interpreted string literals. Raw string literals are character sequences between back quotes “. Within the quotes, any character is legal except back quote. The value of a raw string literal is the string composed of the uninterpreted (implicitly UTF-8-encoded) characters between the quotes; in particular, backslashes have no special meaning and the string may contain newlines. Carriage returns inside raw string literals are discarded from the raw string value. Interpreted string literals are character sequences between double quotes "". The text between the quotes, which may not contain newlines, forms the value of the literal, with backslash escapes interpreted as they are in rune literals (except that \' is illegal and \" is legal), with the same restrictions. The three-digit octal (\nnn) and two-digit hexadecimal (\xnn) escapes represent individual bytes of the resulting string; all other escapes represent the (possibly multi-byte) UTF-8 encoding of individual characters. Thus inside a string literal \377 and \xFF represent a single byte of value 0xFF=255, while ÿ, \u00FF, \U000000FF and \xc3\xbf represent the two bytes 0xc3 0xbf of the UTF-8 encoding of character U+00FF. For example These examples all represent the same string If the statement source represents a character as two code points, such as a combining form involving an accent and a letter, the result will be an error if placed in a rune literal (it is not a single code point), and will appear as two code points if placed in a string literal. Literals are assigned their values from the respective text representation at "compile" (parse) time. QL parameters provide the same functionality as literals, but their value is assigned at execution time from an expression list passed to DB.Run or DB.Execute. Using '?' or '$' is completely equivalent. For example Keywords 'false' and 'true' (not case sensitive) represent the two possible constant values of type bool (also not case sensitive). Keyword 'NULL' (not case sensitive) represents an untyped constant which is assignable to any type. NULL is distinct from any other value of any type. A type determines the set of values and operations specific to values of that type. A type is specified by a type name. Named instances of the boolean, numeric, and string types are keywords. The names are not case sensitive. Note: The blob type is exchanged between the back end and the API as []byte. On 32 bit platforms this limits the size which the implementation can handle to 2G. A boolean type represents the set of Boolean truth values denoted by the predeclared constants true and false. The predeclared boolean type is bool. A duration type represents the elapsed time between two instants as an int64 nanosecond count. The representation limits the largest representable duration to approximately 290 years. A numeric type represents sets of integer or floating-point values. The predeclared architecture-independent numeric types are The value of an n-bit integer is n bits wide and represented using two's complement arithmetic. Conversions are required when different numeric types are mixed in an expression or assignment. A string type represents the set of string values. A string value is a (possibly empty) sequence of bytes. The case insensitive keyword for the string type is 'string'. The length of a string (its size in bytes) can be discovered using the built-in function len. A time type represents an instant in time with nanosecond precision. Each time has associated with it a location, consulted when computing the presentation form of the time. The following functions are implicitly declared An expression specifies the computation of a value by applying operators and functions to operands. Operands denote the elementary values in an expression. An operand may be a literal, a (possibly qualified) identifier denoting a constant or a function or a table/record set column, or a parenthesized expression. A qualified identifier is an identifier qualified with a table/record set name prefix. For example Primary expression are the operands for unary and binary expressions. For example A primary expression of the form denotes the element of a string indexed by x. Its type is byte. The value x is called the index. The following rules apply - The index x must be of integer type except bigint or duration; it is in range if 0 <= x < len(s), otherwise it is out of range. - A constant index must be non-negative and representable by a value of type int. - A constant index must be in range if the string a is a literal. - If x is out of range at run time, a run-time error occurs. - s[x] is the byte at index x and the type of s[x] is byte. If s is NULL or x is NULL then the result is NULL. Otherwise s[x] is illegal. For a string, the primary expression constructs a substring. The indices low and high select which elements appear in the result. The result has indices starting at 0 and length equal to high - low. For convenience, any of the indices may be omitted. A missing low index defaults to zero; a missing high index defaults to the length of the sliced operand The indices low and high are in range if 0 <= low <= high <= len(a), otherwise they are out of range. A constant index must be non-negative and representable by a value of type int. If both indices are constant, they must satisfy low <= high. If the indices are out of range at run time, a run-time error occurs. Integer values of type bigint or duration cannot be used as indices. If s is NULL the result is NULL. If low or high is not omitted and is NULL then the result is NULL. Given an identifier f denoting a predeclared function, calls f with arguments a1, a2, … an. Arguments are evaluated before the function is called. The type of the expression is the result type of f. In a function call, the function value and arguments are evaluated in the usual order. After they are evaluated, the parameters of the call are passed by value to the function and the called function begins execution. The return value of the function is passed by value when the function returns. Calling an undefined function causes a compile-time error. Operators combine operands into expressions. Comparisons are discussed elsewhere. For other binary operators, the operand types must be identical unless the operation involves shifts or untyped constants. For operations involving constants only, see the section on constant expressions. Except for shift operations, if one operand is an untyped constant and the other operand is not, the constant is converted to the type of the other operand. The right operand in a shift expression must have unsigned integer type or be an untyped constant that can be converted to unsigned integer type. If the left operand of a non-constant shift expression is an untyped constant, the type of the constant is what it would be if the shift expression were replaced by its left operand alone. Expressions of the form yield a boolean value true if expr2, a regular expression, matches expr1 (see also [6]). Both expression must be of type string. If any one of the expressions is NULL the result is NULL. Predicates are special form expressions having a boolean result type. Expressions of the form are equivalent, including NULL handling, to The types of involved expressions must be comparable as defined in "Comparison operators". Another form of the IN predicate creates the expression list from a result of a SelectStmt. The SelectStmt must select only one column. The produced expression list is resource limited by the memory available to the process. NULL values produced by the SelectStmt are ignored, but if all records of the SelectStmt are NULL the predicate yields NULL. The select statement is evaluated only once. If the type of expr is not the same as the type of the field returned by the SelectStmt then the set operation yields false. The type of the column returned by the SelectStmt must be one of the simple (non blob-like) types: Expressions of the form are equivalent, including NULL handling, to The types of involved expressions must be ordered as defined in "Comparison operators". Expressions of the form yield a boolean value true if expr does not have a specific type (case A) or if expr has a specific type (case B). In other cases the result is a boolean value false. Unary operators have the highest precedence. There are five precedence levels for binary operators. Multiplication operators bind strongest, followed by addition operators, comparison operators, && (logical AND), and finally || (logical OR) Binary operators of the same precedence associate from left to right. For instance, x / y * z is the same as (x / y) * z. Note that the operator precedence is reflected explicitly by the grammar. Arithmetic operators apply to numeric values and yield a result of the same type as the first operand. The four standard arithmetic operators (+, -, *, /) apply to integer, rational, floating-point, and complex types; + also applies to strings; +,- also applies to times. All other arithmetic operators apply to integers only. sum integers, rationals, floats, complex values, strings difference integers, rationals, floats, complex values, times product integers, rationals, floats, complex values / quotient integers, rationals, floats, complex values % remainder integers & bitwise AND integers | bitwise OR integers ^ bitwise XOR integers &^ bit clear (AND NOT) integers << left shift integer << unsigned integer >> right shift integer >> unsigned integer Strings can be concatenated using the + operator String addition creates a new string by concatenating the operands. A value of type duration can be added to or subtracted from a value of type time. Times can subtracted from each other producing a value of type duration. For two integer values x and y, the integer quotient q = x / y and remainder r = x % y satisfy the following relationships with x / y truncated towards zero ("truncated division"). As an exception to this rule, if the dividend x is the most negative value for the int type of x, the quotient q = x / -1 is equal to x (and r = 0). If the divisor is a constant expression, it must not be zero. If the divisor is zero at run time, a run-time error occurs. If the dividend is non-negative and the divisor is a constant power of 2, the division may be replaced by a right shift, and computing the remainder may be replaced by a bitwise AND operation The shift operators shift the left operand by the shift count specified by the right operand. They implement arithmetic shifts if the left operand is a signed integer and logical shifts if it is an unsigned integer. There is no upper limit on the shift count. Shifts behave as if the left operand is shifted n times by 1 for a shift count of n. As a result, x << 1 is the same as x*2 and x >> 1 is the same as x/2 but truncated towards negative infinity. For integer operands, the unary operators +, -, and ^ are defined as follows For floating-point and complex numbers, +x is the same as x, while -x is the negation of x. The result of a floating-point or complex division by zero is not specified beyond the IEEE-754 standard; whether a run-time error occurs is implementation-specific. Whenever any operand of any arithmetic operation, unary or binary, is NULL, as well as in the case of the string concatenating operation, the result is NULL. For unsigned integer values, the operations +, -, *, and << are computed modulo 2n, where n is the bit width of the unsigned integer's type. Loosely speaking, these unsigned integer operations discard high bits upon overflow, and expressions may rely on “wrap around”. For signed integers with a finite bit width, the operations +, -, *, and << may legally overflow and the resulting value exists and is deterministically defined by the signed integer representation, the operation, and its operands. No exception is raised as a result of overflow. An evaluator may not optimize an expression under the assumption that overflow does not occur. For instance, it may not assume that x < x + 1 is always true. Integers of type bigint and rationals do not overflow but their handling is limited by the memory resources available to the program. Comparison operators compare two operands and yield a boolean value. In any comparison, the first operand must be of same type as is the second operand, or vice versa. The equality operators == and != apply to operands that are comparable. The ordering operators <, <=, >, and >= apply to operands that are ordered. These terms and the result of the comparisons are defined as follows - Boolean values are comparable. Two boolean values are equal if they are either both true or both false. - Complex values are comparable. Two complex values u and v are equal if both real(u) == real(v) and imag(u) == imag(v). - Integer values are comparable and ordered, in the usual way. Note that durations are integers. - Floating point values are comparable and ordered, as defined by the IEEE-754 standard. - Rational values are comparable and ordered, in the usual way. - String and Blob values are comparable and ordered, lexically byte-wise. - Time values are comparable and ordered. Whenever any operand of any comparison operation is NULL, the result is NULL. Note that slices are always of type string. Logical operators apply to boolean values and yield a boolean result. The right operand is evaluated conditionally. The truth tables for logical operations with NULL values Conversions are expressions of the form T(x) where T is a type and x is an expression that can be converted to type T. A constant value x can be converted to type T in any of these cases: - x is representable by a value of type T. - x is a floating-point constant, T is a floating-point type, and x is representable by a value of type T after rounding using IEEE 754 round-to-even rules. The constant T(x) is the rounded value. - x is an integer constant and T is a string type. The same rule as for non-constant x applies in this case. Converting a constant yields a typed constant as result. A non-constant value x can be converted to type T in any of these cases: - x has type T. - x's type and T are both integer or floating point types. - x's type and T are both complex types. - x is an integer, except bigint or duration, and T is a string type. Specific rules apply to (non-constant) conversions between numeric types or to and from a string type. These conversions may change the representation of x and incur a run-time cost. All other conversions only change the type but not the representation of x. A conversion of NULL to any type yields NULL. For the conversion of non-constant numeric values, the following rules apply 1. When converting between integer types, if the value is a signed integer, it is sign extended to implicit infinite precision; otherwise it is zero extended. It is then truncated to fit in the result type's size. For example, if v == uint16(0x10F0), then uint32(int8(v)) == 0xFFFFFFF0. The conversion always yields a valid value; there is no indication of overflow. 2. When converting a floating-point number to an integer, the fraction is discarded (truncation towards zero). 3. When converting an integer or floating-point number to a floating-point type, or a complex number to another complex type, the result value is rounded to the precision specified by the destination type. For instance, the value of a variable x of type float32 may be stored using additional precision beyond that of an IEEE-754 32-bit number, but float32(x) represents the result of rounding x's value to 32-bit precision. Similarly, x + 0.1 may use more than 32 bits of precision, but float32(x + 0.1) does not. In all non-constant conversions involving floating-point or complex values, if the result type cannot represent the value the conversion succeeds but the result value is implementation-dependent. 1. Converting a signed or unsigned integer value to a string type yields a string containing the UTF-8 representation of the integer. Values outside the range of valid Unicode code points are converted to "\uFFFD". 2. Converting a blob to a string type yields a string whose successive bytes are the elements of the blob. 3. Converting a value of a string type to a blob yields a blob whose successive elements are the bytes of the string. 4. Converting a value of a bigint type to a string yields a string containing the decimal decimal representation of the integer. 5. Converting a value of a string type to a bigint yields a bigint value containing the integer represented by the string value. A prefix of “0x” or “0X” selects base 16; the “0” prefix selects base 8, and a “0b” or “0B” prefix selects base 2. Otherwise the value is interpreted in base 10. An error occurs if the string value is not in any valid format. 6. Converting a value of a rational type to a string yields a string containing the decimal decimal representation of the rational in the form "a/b" (even if b == 1). 7. Converting a value of a string type to a bigrat yields a bigrat value containing the rational represented by the string value. The string can be given as a fraction "a/b" or as a floating-point number optionally followed by an exponent. An error occurs if the string value is not in any valid format. 8. Converting a value of a duration type to a string returns a string representing the duration in the form "72h3m0.5s". Leading zero units are omitted. As a special case, durations less than one second format using a smaller unit (milli-, micro-, or nanoseconds) to ensure that the leading digit is non-zero. The zero duration formats as 0, with no unit. 9. Converting a string value to a duration yields a duration represented by the string. A duration string is a possibly signed sequence of decimal numbers, each with optional fraction and a unit suffix, such as "300ms", "-1.5h" or "2h45m". Valid time units are "ns", "us" (or "µs"), "ms", "s", "m", "h". 10. Converting a time value to a string returns the time formatted using the format string When evaluating the operands of an expression or of function calls, operations are evaluated in lexical left-to-right order. For example, in the evaluation of the function calls and evaluation of c happen in the order h(), i(), j(), c. Floating-point operations within a single expression are evaluated according to the associativity of the operators. Explicit parentheses affect the evaluation by overriding the default associativity. In the expression x + (y + z) the addition y + z is performed before adding x. Statements control execution. The empty statement does nothing. Alter table statements modify existing tables. With the ADD clause it adds a new column to the table. The column must not exist. With the DROP clause it removes an existing column from a table. The column must exist and it must be not the only (last) column of the table. IOW, there cannot be a table with no columns. For example When adding a column to a table with existing data, the constraint clause of the ColumnDef cannot be used. Adding a constrained column to an empty table is fine. Begin transactions statements introduce a new transaction level. Every transaction level must be eventually balanced by exactly one of COMMIT or ROLLBACK statements. Note that when a transaction is roll-backed because of a statement failure then no explicit balancing of the respective BEGIN TRANSACTION is statement is required nor permitted. Failure to properly balance any opened transaction level may cause dead locks and/or lose of data updated in the uppermost opened but never properly closed transaction level. For example A database cannot be updated (mutated) outside of a transaction. Statements requiring a transaction A database is effectively read only outside of a transaction. Statements not requiring a transaction The commit statement closes the innermost transaction nesting level. If that's the outermost level then the updates to the DB made by the transaction are atomically made persistent. For example Create index statements create new indices. Index is a named projection of ordered values of a table column to the respective records. As a special case the id() of the record can be indexed. Index name must not be the same as any of the existing tables and it also cannot be the same as of any column name of the table the index is on. For example Now certain SELECT statements may use the indices to speed up joins and/or to speed up record set filtering when the WHERE clause is used; or the indices might be used to improve the performance when the ORDER BY clause is present. The UNIQUE modifier requires the indexed values tuple to be index-wise unique or have all values NULL. The optional IF NOT EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the index already exists. A simple index consists of only one expression which must be either a column name or the built-in id(). A more complex and more general index is one that consists of more than one expression or its single expression does not qualify as a simple index. In this case the type of all expressions in the list must be one of the non blob-like types. Note: Blob-like types are blob, bigint, bigrat, time and duration. Create table statements create new tables. A column definition declares the column name and type. Table names and column names are case sensitive. Neither a table or an index of the same name may exist in the DB. For example The optional IF NOT EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the table already exists. The optional constraint clause has two forms. The first one is found in many SQL dialects. This form prevents the data in column DepartmentName to be NULL. The second form allows an arbitrary boolean expression to be used to validate the column. If the value of the expression is true then the validation succeeded. If the value of the expression is false or NULL then the validation fails. If the value of the expression is not of type bool an error occurs. The optional DEFAULT clause is an expression which, if present, is substituted instead of a NULL value when the colum is assigned a value. Note that the constraint and/or default expressions may refer to other columns by name: When a table row is inserted by the INSERT INTO statement or when a table row is updated by the UPDATE statement, the order of operations is as follows: 1. The new values of the affected columns are set and the values of all the row columns become the named values which can be referred to in default expressions evaluated in step 2. 2. If any row column value is NULL and the DEFAULT clause is present in the column's definition, the default expression is evaluated and its value is set as the respective column value. 3. The values, potentially updated, of row columns become the named values which can be referred to in constraint expressions evaluated during step 4. 4. All row columns which definition has the constraint clause present will have that constraint checked. If any constraint violation is detected, the overall operation fails and no changes to the table are made. Delete from statements remove rows from a table, which must exist. For example If the WHERE clause is not present then all rows are removed and the statement is equivalent to the TRUNCATE TABLE statement. Drop index statements remove indices from the DB. The index must exist. For example The optional IF EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the index does not exist. Drop table statements remove tables from the DB. The table must exist. For example The optional IF EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the table does not exist. Insert into statements insert new rows into tables. New rows come from literal data, if using the VALUES clause, or are a result of select statement. In the later case the select statement is fully evaluated before the insertion of any rows is performed, allowing to insert values calculated from the same table rows are to be inserted into. If the ColumnNameList part is omitted then the number of values inserted in the row must be the same as are columns in the table. If the ColumnNameList part is present then the number of values per row must be same as the same number of column names. All other columns of the record are set to NULL. The type of the value assigned to a column must be the same as is the column's type or the value must be NULL. If there exists an unique index that would make the insert statement fail, the optional IF NOT EXISTS turns the insert statement in such case into a no-op. For example If any of the columns of the table were defined using the optional constraints clause or the optional defaults clause then those are processed on a per row basis. The details are discussed in the "Constraints and defaults" chapter below the CREATE TABLE statement documentation. Explain statement produces a recordset consisting of lines of text which describe the execution plan of a statement, if any. For example, the QL tool treats the explain statement specially and outputs the joined lines: The explanation may aid in uderstanding how a statement/query would be executed and if indices are used as expected - or which indices may possibly improve the statement performance. The create index statements above were directly copy/pasted in the terminal from the suggestions provided by the filter recordset pipeline part returned by the explain statement. If the statement has nothing special in its plan, the result is the original statement. To get an explanation of the select statement of the IN predicate, use the EXPLAIN statement with that particular select statement. The rollback statement closes the innermost transaction nesting level discarding any updates to the DB made by it. If that's the outermost level then the effects on the DB are as if the transaction never happened. For example The (temporary) record set from the last statement is returned and can be processed by the client. In this case the rollback is the same as 'DROP TABLE tmp;' but it can be a more complex operation. Select from statements produce recordsets. The optional DISTINCT modifier ensures all rows in the result recordset are unique. Either all of the resulting fields are returned ('*') or only those named in FieldList. RecordSetList is a list of table names or parenthesized select statements, optionally (re)named using the AS clause. The result can be filtered using a WhereClause and orderd by the OrderBy clause. For example If Recordset is a nested, parenthesized SelectStmt then it must be given a name using the AS clause if its field are to be accessible in expressions. A field is an named expression. Identifiers, not used as a type in conversion or a function name in the Call clause, denote names of (other) fields, values of which should be used in the expression. The expression can be named using the AS clause. If the AS clause is not present and the expression consists solely of a field name, then that field name is used as the name of the resulting field. Otherwise the field is unnamed. For example The SELECT statement can optionally enumerate the desired/resulting fields in a list. No two identical field names can appear in the list. When more than one record set is used in the FROM clause record set list, the result record set field names are rewritten to be qualified using the record set names. If a particular record set doesn't have a name, its respective fields became unnamed. The optional JOIN clause, for example is mostly equal to except that the rows from a which, when they appear in the cross join, never made expr to evaluate to true, are combined with a virtual row from b, containing all nulls, and added to the result set. For the RIGHT JOIN variant the discussed rules are used for rows from b not satisfying expr == true and the virtual, all-null row "comes" from a. The FULL JOIN adds the respective rows which would be otherwise provided by the separate executions of the LEFT JOIN and RIGHT JOIN variants. For more thorough OUTER JOIN discussion please see the Wikipedia article at [10]. Resultins rows of a SELECT statement can be optionally ordered by the ORDER BY clause. Collating proceeds by considering the expressions in the expression list left to right until a collating order is determined. Any possibly remaining expressions are not evaluated. All of the expression values must yield an ordered type or NULL. Ordered types are defined in "Comparison operators". Collating of elements having a NULL value is different compared to what the comparison operators yield in expression evaluation (NULL result instead of a boolean value). Below, T denotes a non NULL value of any QL type. NULL collates before any non NULL value (is considered smaller than T). Two NULLs have no collating order (are considered equal). The WHERE clause restricts records considered by some statements, like SELECT FROM, DELETE FROM, or UPDATE. It is an error if the expression evaluates to a non null value of non bool type. Another form of the WHERE clause is an existence predicate of a parenthesized select statement. The EXISTS form evaluates to true if the parenthesized SELECT statement produces a non empty record set. The NOT EXISTS form evaluates to true if the parenthesized SELECT statement produces an empty record set. The parenthesized SELECT statement is evaluated only once (TODO issue #159). The GROUP BY clause is used to project rows having common values into a smaller set of rows. For example Using the GROUP BY without any aggregate functions in the selected fields is in certain cases equal to using the DISTINCT modifier. The last two examples above produce the same resultsets. The optional OFFSET clause allows to ignore first N records. For example The above will produce only rows 11, 12, ... of the record set, if they exist. The value of the expression must a non negative integer, but not bigint or duration. The optional LIMIT clause allows to ignore all but first N records. For example The above will return at most the first 10 records of the record set. The value of the expression must a non negative integer, but not bigint or duration. The LIMIT and OFFSET clauses can be combined. For example Considering table t has, say 10 records, the above will produce only records 4 - 8. After returning record #8, no more result rows/records are computed. 1. The FROM clause is evaluated, producing a Cartesian product of its source record sets (tables or nested SELECT statements). 2. If present, the JOIN cluase is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation and the recordset specified by the JOIN clause. (... JOIN Recordset ON ...) 3. If present, the WHERE clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation. 4. If present, the GROUP BY clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 5. The SELECT field expressions are evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 6. If present, the DISTINCT modifier is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 7. If present, the ORDER BY clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 8. If present, the OFFSET clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). The offset expression is evaluated once for the first record produced by the previous evaluations. 9. If present, the LIMIT clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). The limit expression is evaluated once for the first record produced by the previous evaluations. Truncate table statements remove all records from a table. The table must exist. For example Update statements change values of fields in rows of a table. For example Note: The SET clause is optional. If any of the columns of the table were defined using the optional constraints clause or the optional defaults clause then those are processed on a per row basis. The details are discussed in the "Constraints and defaults" chapter below the CREATE TABLE statement documentation. To allow to query for DB meta data, there exist specially named tables, some of them being virtual. Note: Virtual system tables may have fake table-wise unique but meaningless and unstable record IDs. Do not apply the built-in id() to any system table. The table __Table lists all tables in the DB. The schema is The Schema column returns the statement to (re)create table Name. This table is virtual. The table __Colum lists all columns of all tables in the DB. The schema is The Ordinal column defines the 1-based index of the column in the record. This table is virtual. The table __Colum2 lists all columns of all tables in the DB which have the constraint NOT NULL or which have a constraint expression defined or which have a default expression defined. The schema is It's possible to obtain a consolidated recordset for all properties of all DB columns using The Name column is the column name in TableName. The table __Index lists all indices in the DB. The schema is The IsUnique columns reflects if the index was created using the optional UNIQUE clause. This table is virtual. Built-in functions are predeclared. The built-in aggregate function avg returns the average of values of an expression. Avg ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if avg is applied to an empty record set. The column values must be of a numeric type. The built-in function coalesce takes at least one argument and returns the first of its arguments which is not NULL. If all arguments are NULL, this function returns NULL. This is useful for providing defaults for NULL values in a select query. The built-in function contains returns true if substr is within s. If any argument to contains is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in aggregate function count returns how many times an expression has a non NULL values or the number of rows in a record set. Note: count() returns 0 for an empty record set. For example Date returns the time corresponding to in the appropriate zone for that time in the given location. The month, day, hour, min, sec, and nsec values may be outside their usual ranges and will be normalized during the conversion. For example, October 32 converts to November 1. A daylight savings time transition skips or repeats times. For example, in the United States, March 13, 2011 2:15am never occurred, while November 6, 2011 1:15am occurred twice. In such cases, the choice of time zone, and therefore the time, is not well-defined. Date returns a time that is correct in one of the two zones involved in the transition, but it does not guarantee which. A location maps time instants to the zone in use at that time. Typically, the location represents the collection of time offsets in use in a geographical area, such as "CEST" and "CET" for central Europe. "local" represents the system's local time zone. "UTC" represents Universal Coordinated Time (UTC). The month specifies a month of the year (January = 1, ...). If any argument to date is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function day returns the day of the month specified by t. If the argument to day is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function formatTime returns a textual representation of the time value formatted according to layout, which defines the format by showing how the reference time, would be displayed if it were the value; it serves as an example of the desired output. The same display rules will then be applied to the time value. If any argument to formatTime is NULL the result is NULL. NOTE: The string value of the time zone, like "CET" or "ACDT", is dependent on the time zone of the machine the function is run on. For example, if the t value is in "CET", but the machine is in "ACDT", instead of "CET" the result is "+0100". This is the same what Go (time.Time).String() returns and in fact formatTime directly calls t.String(). returns on a machine in the CET time zone, but may return on a machine in the ACDT zone. The time value is in both cases the same so its ordering and comparing is correct. Only the display value can differ. The built-in functions formatFloat and formatInt format numbers to strings using go's number format functions in the `strconv` package. For all three functions, only the first argument is mandatory. The default values of the rest are shown in the examples. If the first argument is NULL, the result is NULL. returns returns returns Unlike the `strconv` equivalent, the formatInt function handles all integer types, both signed and unsigned. The built-in function hasPrefix tests whether the string s begins with prefix. If any argument to hasPrefix is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function hasSuffix tests whether the string s ends with suffix. If any argument to hasSuffix is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function hour returns the hour within the day specified by t, in the range [0, 23]. If the argument to hour is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function hours returns the duration as a floating point number of hours. If the argument to hours is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function id takes zero or one arguments. If no argument is provided, id() returns a table-unique automatically assigned numeric identifier of type int. Ids of deleted records are not reused unless the DB becomes completely empty (has no tables). For example If id() without arguments is called for a row which is not a table record then the result value is NULL. For example If id() has one argument it must be a table name of a table in a cross join. For example The built-in function len takes a string argument and returns the lentgh of the string in bytes. The expression len(s) is constant if s is a string constant. If the argument to len is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in aggregate function max returns the largest value of an expression in a record set. Max ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if max is applied to an empty record set. The expression values must be of an ordered type. For example The built-in aggregate function min returns the smallest value of an expression in a record set. Min ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if min is applied to an empty record set. For example The column values must be of an ordered type. The built-in function minute returns the minute offset within the hour specified by t, in the range [0, 59]. If the argument to minute is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function minutes returns the duration as a floating point number of minutes. If the argument to minutes is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function month returns the month of the year specified by t (January = 1, ...). If the argument to month is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function nanosecond returns the nanosecond offset within the second specified by t, in the range [0, 999999999]. If the argument to nanosecond is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function nanoseconds returns the duration as an integer nanosecond count. If the argument to nanoseconds is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function now returns the current local time. The built-in function parseTime parses a formatted string and returns the time value it represents. The layout defines the format by showing how the reference time, would be interpreted if it were the value; it serves as an example of the input format. The same interpretation will then be made to the input string. Elements omitted from the value are assumed to be zero or, when zero is impossible, one, so parsing "3:04pm" returns the time corresponding to Jan 1, year 0, 15:04:00 UTC (note that because the year is 0, this time is before the zero Time). Years must be in the range 0000..9999. The day of the week is checked for syntax but it is otherwise ignored. In the absence of a time zone indicator, parseTime returns a time in UTC. When parsing a time with a zone offset like -0700, if the offset corresponds to a time zone used by the current location, then parseTime uses that location and zone in the returned time. Otherwise it records the time as being in a fabricated location with time fixed at the given zone offset. When parsing a time with a zone abbreviation like MST, if the zone abbreviation has a defined offset in the current location, then that offset is used. The zone abbreviation "UTC" is recognized as UTC regardless of location. If the zone abbreviation is unknown, Parse records the time as being in a fabricated location with the given zone abbreviation and a zero offset. This choice means that such a time can be parses and reformatted with the same layout losslessly, but the exact instant used in the representation will differ by the actual zone offset. To avoid such problems, prefer time layouts that use a numeric zone offset. If any argument to parseTime is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function second returns the second offset within the minute specified by t, in the range [0, 59]. If the argument to second is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function seconds returns the duration as a floating point number of seconds. If the argument to seconds is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function since returns the time elapsed since t. It is shorthand for now()-t. If the argument to since is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in aggregate function sum returns the sum of values of an expression for all rows of a record set. Sum ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if sum is applied to an empty record set. The column values must be of a numeric type. The built-in function timeIn returns t with the location information set to loc. For discussion of the loc argument please see date(). If any argument to timeIn is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function weekday returns the day of the week specified by t. Sunday == 0, Monday == 1, ... If the argument to weekday is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function year returns the year in which t occurs. If the argument to year is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function yearDay returns the day of the year specified by t, in the range [1,365] for non-leap years, and [1,366] in leap years. If the argument to yearDay is NULL the result is NULL. Three functions assemble and disassemble complex numbers. The built-in function complex constructs a complex value from a floating-point real and imaginary part, while real and imag extract the real and imaginary parts of a complex value. The type of the arguments and return value correspond. For complex, the two arguments must be of the same floating-point type and the return type is the complex type with the corresponding floating-point constituents: complex64 for float32, complex128 for float64. The real and imag functions together form the inverse, so for a complex value z, z == complex(real(z), imag(z)). If the operands of these functions are all constants, the return value is a constant. If any argument to any of complex, real, imag functions is NULL the result is NULL. For the numeric types, the following sizes are guaranteed Portions of this specification page are modifications based on work[2] created and shared by Google[3] and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License[4]. This specification is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, and code is licensed under a BSD license[5]. Links from the above documentation This section is not part of the specification. WARNING: The implementation of indices is new and it surely needs more time to become mature. Indices are used currently used only by the WHERE clause. The following expression patterns of 'WHERE expression' are recognized and trigger index use. The relOp is one of the relation operators <, <=, ==, >=, >. For the equality operator both operands must be of comparable types. For all other operators both operands must be of ordered types. The constant expression is a compile time constant expression. Some constant folding is still a TODO. Parameter is a QL parameter ($1 etc.). Consider tables t and u, both with an indexed field f. The WHERE expression doesn't comply with the above simple detected cases. However, such query is now automatically rewritten to which will use both of the indices. The impact of using the indices can be substantial (cf. BenchmarkCrossJoin*) if the resulting rows have low "selectivity", ie. only few rows from both tables are selected by the respective WHERE filtering. Note: Existing QL DBs can be used and indices can be added to them. However, once any indices are present in the DB, the old QL versions cannot work with such DB anymore. Running a benchmark with -v (-test.v) outputs information about the scale used to report records/s and a brief description of the benchmark. For example Running the full suite of benchmarks takes a lot of time. Use the -timeout flag to avoid them being killed after the default time limit (10 minutes).
Package ql implements a pure Go embedded SQL database engine. QL is a member of the SQL family of languages. It is less complex and less powerful than SQL (whichever specification SQL is considered to be). 2017-01-10: Release v1.1.0 fixes some bugs and adds a configurable WAL headroom. 2016-07-29: Release v1.0.6 enables alternatively using = instead of == for equality operation. 2016-07-11: Release v1.0.5 undoes vendoring of lldb. QL now uses stable lldb (github.com/cznic/lldb). 2016-07-06: Release v1.0.4 fixes a panic when closing the WAL file. 2016-04-03: Release v1.0.3 fixes a data race. 2016-03-23: Release v1.0.2 vendors github.com/cznic/exp/lldb and github.com/camlistore/go4/lock. 2016-03-17: Release v1.0.1 adjusts for latest goyacc. Parser error messages are improved and changed, but their exact form is not considered a API change. 2016-03-05: The current version has been tagged v1.0.0. 2015-06-15: To improve compatibility with other SQL implementations, the count built-in aggregate function now accepts * as its argument. 2015-05-29: The execution planner was rewritten from scratch. It should use indices in all places where they were used before plus in some additional situations. It is possible to investigate the plan using the newly added EXPLAIN statement. The QL tool is handy for such analysis. If the planner would have used an index, but no such exists, the plan includes hints in form of copy/paste ready CREATE INDEX statements. The planner is still quite simple and a lot of work on it is yet ahead. You can help this process by filling an issue with a schema and query which fails to use an index or indices when it should, in your opinion. Bonus points for including output of `ql 'explain <query>'`. 2015-05-09: The grammar of the CREATE INDEX statement now accepts an expression list instead of a single expression, which was further limited to just a column name or the built-in id(). As a side effect, composite indices are now functional. However, the values in the expression-list style index are not yet used by other statements or the statement/query planner. The composite index is useful while having UNIQUE clause to check for semantically duplicate rows before they get added to the table or when such a row is mutated using the UPDATE statement and the expression-list style index tuple of the row is thus recomputed. 2015-05-02: The Schema field of table __Table now correctly reflects any column constraints and/or defaults. Also, the (*DB).Info method now has that information provided in new ColumInfo fields NotNull, Constraint and Default. 2015-04-20: Added support for {LEFT,RIGHT,FULL} [OUTER] JOIN. 2015-04-18: Column definitions can now have constraints and defaults. Details are discussed in the "Constraints and defaults" chapter below the CREATE TABLE statement documentation. 2015-03-06: New built-in functions formatFloat and formatInt. Thanks urandom! (https://github.com/urandom) 2015-02-16: IN predicate now accepts a SELECT statement. See the updated "Predicates" section. 2015-01-17: Logical operators || and && have now alternative spellings: OR and AND (case insensitive). AND was a keyword before, but OR is a new one. This can possibly break existing queries. For the record, it's a good idea to not use any name appearing in, for example, [7] in your queries as the list of QL's keywords may expand for gaining better compatibility with existing SQL "standards". 2015-01-12: ACID guarantees were tightened at the cost of performance in some cases. The write collecting window mechanism, a formerly used implementation detail, was removed. Inserting rows one by one in a transaction is now slow. I mean very slow. Try to avoid inserting single rows in a transaction. Instead, whenever possible, perform batch updates of tens to, say thousands of rows in a single transaction. See also: http://www.sqlite.org/faq.html#q19, the discussed synchronization principles involved are the same as for QL, modulo minor details. Note: A side effect is that closing a DB before exiting an application, both for the Go API and through database/sql driver, is no more required, strictly speaking. Beware that exiting an application while there is an open (uncommitted) transaction in progress means losing the transaction data. However, the DB will not become corrupted because of not closing it. Nor that was the case before, but formerly failing to close a DB could have resulted in losing the data of the last transaction. 2014-09-21: id() now optionally accepts a single argument - a table name. 2014-09-01: Added the DB.Flush() method and the LIKE pattern matching predicate. 2014-08-08: The built in functions max and min now accept also time values. Thanks opennota! (https://github.com/opennota) 2014-06-05: RecordSet interface extended by new methods FirstRow and Rows. 2014-06-02: Indices on id() are now used by SELECT statements. 2014-05-07: Introduction of Marshal, Schema, Unmarshal. 2014-04-15: Added optional IF NOT EXISTS clause to CREATE INDEX and optional IF EXISTS clause to DROP INDEX. 2014-04-12: The column Unique in the virtual table __Index was renamed to IsUnique because the old name is a keyword. Unfortunately, this is a breaking change, sorry. 2014-04-11: Introduction of LIMIT, OFFSET. 2014-04-10: Introduction of query rewriting. 2014-04-07: Introduction of indices. QL imports zappy[8], a block-based compressor, which speeds up its performance by using a C version of the compression/decompression algorithms. If a CGO-free (pure Go) version of QL, or an app using QL, is required, please include 'purego' in the -tags option of go {build,get,install}. For example: If zappy was installed before installing QL, it might be necessary to rebuild zappy first (or rebuild QL with all its dependencies using the -a option): The syntax is specified using Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF) Lower-case production names are used to identify lexical tokens. Non-terminals are in CamelCase. Lexical tokens are enclosed in double quotes "" or back quotes “. The form a … b represents the set of characters from a through b as alternatives. The horizontal ellipsis … is also used elsewhere in the spec to informally denote various enumerations or code snippets that are not further specified. QL source code is Unicode text encoded in UTF-8. The text is not canonicalized, so a single accented code point is distinct from the same character constructed from combining an accent and a letter; those are treated as two code points. For simplicity, this document will use the unqualified term character to refer to a Unicode code point in the source text. Each code point is distinct; for instance, upper and lower case letters are different characters. Implementation restriction: For compatibility with other tools, the parser may disallow the NUL character (U+0000) in the statement. Implementation restriction: A byte order mark is disallowed anywhere in QL statements. The following terms are used to denote specific character classes The underscore character _ (U+005F) is considered a letter. Lexical elements are comments, tokens, identifiers, keywords, operators and delimiters, integer, floating-point, imaginary, rune and string literals and QL parameters. Line comments start with the character sequence // or -- and stop at the end of the line. A line comment acts like a space. General comments start with the character sequence /* and continue through the character sequence */. A general comment acts like a space. Comments do not nest. Tokens form the vocabulary of QL. There are four classes: identifiers, keywords, operators and delimiters, and literals. White space, formed from spaces (U+0020), horizontal tabs (U+0009), carriage returns (U+000D), and newlines (U+000A), is ignored except as it separates tokens that would otherwise combine into a single token. The formal grammar uses semicolons ";" as separators of QL statements. A single QL statement or the last QL statement in a list of statements can have an optional semicolon terminator. (Actually a separator from the following empty statement.) Identifiers name entities such as tables or record set columns. An identifier is a sequence of one or more letters and digits. The first character in an identifier must be a letter. For example No identifiers are predeclared, however note that no keyword can be used as an identifier. Identifiers starting with two underscores are used for meta data virtual tables names. For forward compatibility, users should generally avoid using any identifiers starting with two underscores. For example The following keywords are reserved and may not be used as identifiers. Keywords are not case sensitive. The following character sequences represent operators, delimiters, and other special tokens Operators consisting of more than one character are referred to by names in the rest of the documentation An integer literal is a sequence of digits representing an integer constant. An optional prefix sets a non-decimal base: 0 for octal, 0x or 0X for hexadecimal. In hexadecimal literals, letters a-f and A-F represent values 10 through 15. For example A floating-point literal is a decimal representation of a floating-point constant. It has an integer part, a decimal point, a fractional part, and an exponent part. The integer and fractional part comprise decimal digits; the exponent part is an e or E followed by an optionally signed decimal exponent. One of the integer part or the fractional part may be elided; one of the decimal point or the exponent may be elided. For example An imaginary literal is a decimal representation of the imaginary part of a complex constant. It consists of a floating-point literal or decimal integer followed by the lower-case letter i. For example A rune literal represents a rune constant, an integer value identifying a Unicode code point. A rune literal is expressed as one or more characters enclosed in single quotes. Within the quotes, any character may appear except single quote and newline. A single quoted character represents the Unicode value of the character itself, while multi-character sequences beginning with a backslash encode values in various formats. The simplest form represents the single character within the quotes; since QL statements are Unicode characters encoded in UTF-8, multiple UTF-8-encoded bytes may represent a single integer value. For instance, the literal 'a' holds a single byte representing a literal a, Unicode U+0061, value 0x61, while 'ä' holds two bytes (0xc3 0xa4) representing a literal a-dieresis, U+00E4, value 0xe4. Several backslash escapes allow arbitrary values to be encoded as ASCII text. There are four ways to represent the integer value as a numeric constant: \x followed by exactly two hexadecimal digits; \u followed by exactly four hexadecimal digits; \U followed by exactly eight hexadecimal digits, and a plain backslash \ followed by exactly three octal digits. In each case the value of the literal is the value represented by the digits in the corresponding base. Although these representations all result in an integer, they have different valid ranges. Octal escapes must represent a value between 0 and 255 inclusive. Hexadecimal escapes satisfy this condition by construction. The escapes \u and \U represent Unicode code points so within them some values are illegal, in particular those above 0x10FFFF and surrogate halves. After a backslash, certain single-character escapes represent special values All other sequences starting with a backslash are illegal inside rune literals. For example A string literal represents a string constant obtained from concatenating a sequence of characters. There are two forms: raw string literals and interpreted string literals. Raw string literals are character sequences between back quotes “. Within the quotes, any character is legal except back quote. The value of a raw string literal is the string composed of the uninterpreted (implicitly UTF-8-encoded) characters between the quotes; in particular, backslashes have no special meaning and the string may contain newlines. Carriage returns inside raw string literals are discarded from the raw string value. Interpreted string literals are character sequences between double quotes "". The text between the quotes, which may not contain newlines, forms the value of the literal, with backslash escapes interpreted as they are in rune literals (except that \' is illegal and \" is legal), with the same restrictions. The three-digit octal (\nnn) and two-digit hexadecimal (\xnn) escapes represent individual bytes of the resulting string; all other escapes represent the (possibly multi-byte) UTF-8 encoding of individual characters. Thus inside a string literal \377 and \xFF represent a single byte of value 0xFF=255, while ÿ, \u00FF, \U000000FF and \xc3\xbf represent the two bytes 0xc3 0xbf of the UTF-8 encoding of character U+00FF. For example These examples all represent the same string If the statement source represents a character as two code points, such as a combining form involving an accent and a letter, the result will be an error if placed in a rune literal (it is not a single code point), and will appear as two code points if placed in a string literal. Literals are assigned their values from the respective text representation at "compile" (parse) time. QL parameters provide the same functionality as literals, but their value is assigned at execution time from an expression list passed to DB.Run or DB.Execute. Using '?' or '$' is completely equivalent. For example Keywords 'false' and 'true' (not case sensitive) represent the two possible constant values of type bool (also not case sensitive). Keyword 'NULL' (not case sensitive) represents an untyped constant which is assignable to any type. NULL is distinct from any other value of any type. A type determines the set of values and operations specific to values of that type. A type is specified by a type name. Named instances of the boolean, numeric, and string types are keywords. The names are not case sensitive. Note: The blob type is exchanged between the back end and the API as []byte. On 32 bit platforms this limits the size which the implementation can handle to 2G. A boolean type represents the set of Boolean truth values denoted by the predeclared constants true and false. The predeclared boolean type is bool. A duration type represents the elapsed time between two instants as an int64 nanosecond count. The representation limits the largest representable duration to approximately 290 years. A numeric type represents sets of integer or floating-point values. The predeclared architecture-independent numeric types are The value of an n-bit integer is n bits wide and represented using two's complement arithmetic. Conversions are required when different numeric types are mixed in an expression or assignment. A string type represents the set of string values. A string value is a (possibly empty) sequence of bytes. The case insensitive keyword for the string type is 'string'. The length of a string (its size in bytes) can be discovered using the built-in function len. A time type represents an instant in time with nanosecond precision. Each time has associated with it a location, consulted when computing the presentation form of the time. The following functions are implicitly declared An expression specifies the computation of a value by applying operators and functions to operands. Operands denote the elementary values in an expression. An operand may be a literal, a (possibly qualified) identifier denoting a constant or a function or a table/record set column, or a parenthesized expression. A qualified identifier is an identifier qualified with a table/record set name prefix. For example Primary expression are the operands for unary and binary expressions. For example A primary expression of the form denotes the element of a string indexed by x. Its type is byte. The value x is called the index. The following rules apply - The index x must be of integer type except bigint or duration; it is in range if 0 <= x < len(s), otherwise it is out of range. - A constant index must be non-negative and representable by a value of type int. - A constant index must be in range if the string a is a literal. - If x is out of range at run time, a run-time error occurs. - s[x] is the byte at index x and the type of s[x] is byte. If s is NULL or x is NULL then the result is NULL. Otherwise s[x] is illegal. For a string, the primary expression constructs a substring. The indices low and high select which elements appear in the result. The result has indices starting at 0 and length equal to high - low. For convenience, any of the indices may be omitted. A missing low index defaults to zero; a missing high index defaults to the length of the sliced operand The indices low and high are in range if 0 <= low <= high <= len(a), otherwise they are out of range. A constant index must be non-negative and representable by a value of type int. If both indices are constant, they must satisfy low <= high. If the indices are out of range at run time, a run-time error occurs. Integer values of type bigint or duration cannot be used as indices. If s is NULL the result is NULL. If low or high is not omitted and is NULL then the result is NULL. Given an identifier f denoting a predeclared function, calls f with arguments a1, a2, … an. Arguments are evaluated before the function is called. The type of the expression is the result type of f. In a function call, the function value and arguments are evaluated in the usual order. After they are evaluated, the parameters of the call are passed by value to the function and the called function begins execution. The return value of the function is passed by value when the function returns. Calling an undefined function causes a compile-time error. Operators combine operands into expressions. Comparisons are discussed elsewhere. For other binary operators, the operand types must be identical unless the operation involves shifts or untyped constants. For operations involving constants only, see the section on constant expressions. Except for shift operations, if one operand is an untyped constant and the other operand is not, the constant is converted to the type of the other operand. The right operand in a shift expression must have unsigned integer type or be an untyped constant that can be converted to unsigned integer type. If the left operand of a non-constant shift expression is an untyped constant, the type of the constant is what it would be if the shift expression were replaced by its left operand alone. Expressions of the form yield a boolean value true if expr2, a regular expression, matches expr1 (see also [6]). Both expression must be of type string. If any one of the expressions is NULL the result is NULL. Predicates are special form expressions having a boolean result type. Expressions of the form are equivalent, including NULL handling, to The types of involved expressions must be comparable as defined in "Comparison operators". Another form of the IN predicate creates the expression list from a result of a SelectStmt. The SelectStmt must select only one column. The produced expression list is resource limited by the memory available to the process. NULL values produced by the SelectStmt are ignored, but if all records of the SelectStmt are NULL the predicate yields NULL. The select statement is evaluated only once. If the type of expr is not the same as the type of the field returned by the SelectStmt then the set operation yields false. The type of the column returned by the SelectStmt must be one of the simple (non blob-like) types: Expressions of the form are equivalent, including NULL handling, to The types of involved expressions must be ordered as defined in "Comparison operators". Expressions of the form yield a boolean value true if expr does not have a specific type (case A) or if expr has a specific type (case B). In other cases the result is a boolean value false. Unary operators have the highest precedence. There are five precedence levels for binary operators. Multiplication operators bind strongest, followed by addition operators, comparison operators, && (logical AND), and finally || (logical OR) Binary operators of the same precedence associate from left to right. For instance, x / y * z is the same as (x / y) * z. Note that the operator precedence is reflected explicitly by the grammar. Arithmetic operators apply to numeric values and yield a result of the same type as the first operand. The four standard arithmetic operators (+, -, *, /) apply to integer, rational, floating-point, and complex types; + also applies to strings; +,- also applies to times. All other arithmetic operators apply to integers only. sum integers, rationals, floats, complex values, strings difference integers, rationals, floats, complex values, times product integers, rationals, floats, complex values / quotient integers, rationals, floats, complex values % remainder integers & bitwise AND integers | bitwise OR integers ^ bitwise XOR integers &^ bit clear (AND NOT) integers << left shift integer << unsigned integer >> right shift integer >> unsigned integer Strings can be concatenated using the + operator String addition creates a new string by concatenating the operands. A value of type duration can be added to or subtracted from a value of type time. Times can subtracted from each other producing a value of type duration. For two integer values x and y, the integer quotient q = x / y and remainder r = x % y satisfy the following relationships with x / y truncated towards zero ("truncated division"). As an exception to this rule, if the dividend x is the most negative value for the int type of x, the quotient q = x / -1 is equal to x (and r = 0). If the divisor is a constant expression, it must not be zero. If the divisor is zero at run time, a run-time error occurs. If the dividend is non-negative and the divisor is a constant power of 2, the division may be replaced by a right shift, and computing the remainder may be replaced by a bitwise AND operation The shift operators shift the left operand by the shift count specified by the right operand. They implement arithmetic shifts if the left operand is a signed integer and logical shifts if it is an unsigned integer. There is no upper limit on the shift count. Shifts behave as if the left operand is shifted n times by 1 for a shift count of n. As a result, x << 1 is the same as x*2 and x >> 1 is the same as x/2 but truncated towards negative infinity. For integer operands, the unary operators +, -, and ^ are defined as follows For floating-point and complex numbers, +x is the same as x, while -x is the negation of x. The result of a floating-point or complex division by zero is not specified beyond the IEEE-754 standard; whether a run-time error occurs is implementation-specific. Whenever any operand of any arithmetic operation, unary or binary, is NULL, as well as in the case of the string concatenating operation, the result is NULL. For unsigned integer values, the operations +, -, *, and << are computed modulo 2n, where n is the bit width of the unsigned integer's type. Loosely speaking, these unsigned integer operations discard high bits upon overflow, and expressions may rely on “wrap around”. For signed integers with a finite bit width, the operations +, -, *, and << may legally overflow and the resulting value exists and is deterministically defined by the signed integer representation, the operation, and its operands. No exception is raised as a result of overflow. An evaluator may not optimize an expression under the assumption that overflow does not occur. For instance, it may not assume that x < x + 1 is always true. Integers of type bigint and rationals do not overflow but their handling is limited by the memory resources available to the program. Comparison operators compare two operands and yield a boolean value. In any comparison, the first operand must be of same type as is the second operand, or vice versa. The equality operators == and != apply to operands that are comparable. The ordering operators <, <=, >, and >= apply to operands that are ordered. These terms and the result of the comparisons are defined as follows - Boolean values are comparable. Two boolean values are equal if they are either both true or both false. - Complex values are comparable. Two complex values u and v are equal if both real(u) == real(v) and imag(u) == imag(v). - Integer values are comparable and ordered, in the usual way. Note that durations are integers. - Floating point values are comparable and ordered, as defined by the IEEE-754 standard. - Rational values are comparable and ordered, in the usual way. - String values are comparable and ordered, lexically byte-wise. - Time values are comparable and ordered. Whenever any operand of any comparison operation is NULL, the result is NULL. Note that slices are always of type string. Logical operators apply to boolean values and yield a boolean result. The right operand is evaluated conditionally. The truth tables for logical operations with NULL values Conversions are expressions of the form T(x) where T is a type and x is an expression that can be converted to type T. A constant value x can be converted to type T in any of these cases: - x is representable by a value of type T. - x is a floating-point constant, T is a floating-point type, and x is representable by a value of type T after rounding using IEEE 754 round-to-even rules. The constant T(x) is the rounded value. - x is an integer constant and T is a string type. The same rule as for non-constant x applies in this case. Converting a constant yields a typed constant as result. A non-constant value x can be converted to type T in any of these cases: - x has type T. - x's type and T are both integer or floating point types. - x's type and T are both complex types. - x is an integer, except bigint or duration, and T is a string type. Specific rules apply to (non-constant) conversions between numeric types or to and from a string type. These conversions may change the representation of x and incur a run-time cost. All other conversions only change the type but not the representation of x. A conversion of NULL to any type yields NULL. For the conversion of non-constant numeric values, the following rules apply 1. When converting between integer types, if the value is a signed integer, it is sign extended to implicit infinite precision; otherwise it is zero extended. It is then truncated to fit in the result type's size. For example, if v == uint16(0x10F0), then uint32(int8(v)) == 0xFFFFFFF0. The conversion always yields a valid value; there is no indication of overflow. 2. When converting a floating-point number to an integer, the fraction is discarded (truncation towards zero). 3. When converting an integer or floating-point number to a floating-point type, or a complex number to another complex type, the result value is rounded to the precision specified by the destination type. For instance, the value of a variable x of type float32 may be stored using additional precision beyond that of an IEEE-754 32-bit number, but float32(x) represents the result of rounding x's value to 32-bit precision. Similarly, x + 0.1 may use more than 32 bits of precision, but float32(x + 0.1) does not. In all non-constant conversions involving floating-point or complex values, if the result type cannot represent the value the conversion succeeds but the result value is implementation-dependent. 1. Converting a signed or unsigned integer value to a string type yields a string containing the UTF-8 representation of the integer. Values outside the range of valid Unicode code points are converted to "\uFFFD". 2. Converting a blob to a string type yields a string whose successive bytes are the elements of the blob. 3. Converting a value of a string type to a blob yields a blob whose successive elements are the bytes of the string. 4. Converting a value of a bigint type to a string yields a string containing the decimal decimal representation of the integer. 5. Converting a value of a string type to a bigint yields a bigint value containing the integer represented by the string value. A prefix of “0x” or “0X” selects base 16; the “0” prefix selects base 8, and a “0b” or “0B” prefix selects base 2. Otherwise the value is interpreted in base 10. An error occurs if the string value is not in any valid format. 6. Converting a value of a rational type to a string yields a string containing the decimal decimal representation of the rational in the form "a/b" (even if b == 1). 7. Converting a value of a string type to a bigrat yields a bigrat value containing the rational represented by the string value. The string can be given as a fraction "a/b" or as a floating-point number optionally followed by an exponent. An error occurs if the string value is not in any valid format. 8. Converting a value of a duration type to a string returns a string representing the duration in the form "72h3m0.5s". Leading zero units are omitted. As a special case, durations less than one second format using a smaller unit (milli-, micro-, or nanoseconds) to ensure that the leading digit is non-zero. The zero duration formats as 0, with no unit. 9. Converting a string value to a duration yields a duration represented by the string. A duration string is a possibly signed sequence of decimal numbers, each with optional fraction and a unit suffix, such as "300ms", "-1.5h" or "2h45m". Valid time units are "ns", "us" (or "µs"), "ms", "s", "m", "h". 10. Converting a time value to a string returns the time formatted using the format string When evaluating the operands of an expression or of function calls, operations are evaluated in lexical left-to-right order. For example, in the evaluation of the function calls and evaluation of c happen in the order h(), i(), j(), c. Floating-point operations within a single expression are evaluated according to the associativity of the operators. Explicit parentheses affect the evaluation by overriding the default associativity. In the expression x + (y + z) the addition y + z is performed before adding x. Statements control execution. The empty statement does nothing. Alter table statements modify existing tables. With the ADD clause it adds a new column to the table. The column must not exist. With the DROP clause it removes an existing column from a table. The column must exist and it must be not the only (last) column of the table. IOW, there cannot be a table with no columns. For example When adding a column to a table with existing data, the constraint clause of the ColumnDef cannot be used. Adding a constrained column to an empty table is fine. Begin transactions statements introduce a new transaction level. Every transaction level must be eventually balanced by exactly one of COMMIT or ROLLBACK statements. Note that when a transaction is roll-backed because of a statement failure then no explicit balancing of the respective BEGIN TRANSACTION is statement is required nor permitted. Failure to properly balance any opened transaction level may cause dead locks and/or lose of data updated in the uppermost opened but never properly closed transaction level. For example A database cannot be updated (mutated) outside of a transaction. Statements requiring a transaction A database is effectively read only outside of a transaction. Statements not requiring a transaction The commit statement closes the innermost transaction nesting level. If that's the outermost level then the updates to the DB made by the transaction are atomically made persistent. For example Create index statements create new indices. Index is a named projection of ordered values of a table column to the respective records. As a special case the id() of the record can be indexed. Index name must not be the same as any of the existing tables and it also cannot be the same as of any column name of the table the index is on. For example Now certain SELECT statements may use the indices to speed up joins and/or to speed up record set filtering when the WHERE clause is used; or the indices might be used to improve the performance when the ORDER BY clause is present. The UNIQUE modifier requires the indexed values tuple to be index-wise unique or have all values NULL. The optional IF NOT EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the index already exists. A simple index consists of only one expression which must be either a column name or the built-in id(). A more complex and more general index is one that consists of more than one expression or its single expression does not qualify as a simple index. In this case the type of all expressions in the list must be one of the non blob-like types. Note: Blob-like types are blob, bigint, bigrat, time and duration. Create table statements create new tables. A column definition declares the column name and type. Table names and column names are case sensitive. Neither a table or an index of the same name may exist in the DB. For example The optional IF NOT EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the table already exists. The optional constraint clause has two forms. The first one is found in many SQL dialects. This form prevents the data in column DepartmentName to be NULL. The second form allows an arbitrary boolean expression to be used to validate the column. If the value of the expression is true then the validation succeeded. If the value of the expression is false or NULL then the validation fails. If the value of the expression is not of type bool an error occurs. The optional DEFAULT clause is an expression which, if present, is substituted instead of a NULL value when the colum is assigned a value. Note that the constraint and/or default expressions may refer to other columns by name: When a table row is inserted by the INSERT INTO statement or when a table row is updated by the UPDATE statement, the order of operations is as follows: 1. The new values of the affected columns are set and the values of all the row columns become the named values which can be referred to in default expressions evaluated in step 2. 2. If any row column value is NULL and the DEFAULT clause is present in the column's definition, the default expression is evaluated and its value is set as the respective column value. 3. The values, potentially updated, of row columns become the named values which can be referred to in constraint expressions evaluated during step 4. 4. All row columns which definition has the constraint clause present will have that constraint checked. If any constraint violation is detected, the overall operation fails and no changes to the table are made. Delete from statements remove rows from a table, which must exist. For example If the WHERE clause is not present then all rows are removed and the statement is equivalent to the TRUNCATE TABLE statement. Drop index statements remove indices from the DB. The index must exist. For example The optional IF EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the index does not exist. Drop table statements remove tables from the DB. The table must exist. For example The optional IF EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the table does not exist. Insert into statements insert new rows into tables. New rows come from literal data, if using the VALUES clause, or are a result of select statement. In the later case the select statement is fully evaluated before the insertion of any rows is performed, allowing to insert values calculated from the same table rows are to be inserted into. If the ColumnNameList part is omitted then the number of values inserted in the row must be the same as are columns in the table. If the ColumnNameList part is present then the number of values per row must be same as the same number of column names. All other columns of the record are set to NULL. The type of the value assigned to a column must be the same as is the column's type or the value must be NULL. For example If any of the columns of the table were defined using the optional constraints clause or the optional defaults clause then those are processed on a per row basis. The details are discussed in the "Constraints and defaults" chapter below the CREATE TABLE statement documentation. Explain statement produces a recordset consisting of lines of text which describe the execution plan of a statement, if any. For example, the QL tool treats the explain statement specially and outputs the joined lines: The explanation may aid in uderstanding how a statement/query would be executed and if indices are used as expected - or which indices may possibly improve the statement performance. The create index statements above were directly copy/pasted in the terminal from the suggestions provided by the filter recordset pipeline part returned by the explain statement. If the statement has nothing special in its plan, the result is the original statement. To get an explanation of the select statement of the IN predicate, use the EXPLAIN statement with that particular select statement. The rollback statement closes the innermost transaction nesting level discarding any updates to the DB made by it. If that's the outermost level then the effects on the DB are as if the transaction never happened. For example The (temporary) record set from the last statement is returned and can be processed by the client. In this case the rollback is the same as 'DROP TABLE tmp;' but it can be a more complex operation. Select from statements produce recordsets. The optional DISTINCT modifier ensures all rows in the result recordset are unique. Either all of the resulting fields are returned ('*') or only those named in FieldList. RecordSetList is a list of table names or parenthesized select statements, optionally (re)named using the AS clause. The result can be filtered using a WhereClause and orderd by the OrderBy clause. For example If Recordset is a nested, parenthesized SelectStmt then it must be given a name using the AS clause if its field are to be accessible in expressions. A field is an named expression. Identifiers, not used as a type in conversion or a function name in the Call clause, denote names of (other) fields, values of which should be used in the expression. The expression can be named using the AS clause. If the AS clause is not present and the expression consists solely of a field name, then that field name is used as the name of the resulting field. Otherwise the field is unnamed. For example The SELECT statement can optionally enumerate the desired/resulting fields in a list. No two identical field names can appear in the list. When more than one record set is used in the FROM clause record set list, the result record set field names are rewritten to be qualified using the record set names. If a particular record set doesn't have a name, its respective fields became unnamed. The optional JOIN clause, for example is mostly equal to except that the rows from a which, when they appear in the cross join, never made expr to evaluate to true, are combined with a virtual row from b, containing all nulls, and added to the result set. For the RIGHT JOIN variant the discussed rules are used for rows from b not satisfying expr == true and the virtual, all-null row "comes" from a. The FULL JOIN adds the respective rows which would be otherwise provided by the separate executions of the LEFT JOIN and RIGHT JOIN variants. For more thorough OUTER JOIN discussion please see the Wikipedia article at [10]. Resultins rows of a SELECT statement can be optionally ordered by the ORDER BY clause. Collating proceeds by considering the expressions in the expression list left to right until a collating order is determined. Any possibly remaining expressions are not evaluated. All of the expression values must yield an ordered type or NULL. Ordered types are defined in "Comparison operators". Collating of elements having a NULL value is different compared to what the comparison operators yield in expression evaluation (NULL result instead of a boolean value). Below, T denotes a non NULL value of any QL type. NULL collates before any non NULL value (is considered smaller than T). Two NULLs have no collating order (are considered equal). The WHERE clause restricts records considered by some statements, like SELECT FROM, DELETE FROM, or UPDATE. It is an error if the expression evaluates to a non null value of non bool type. The GROUP BY clause is used to project rows having common values into a smaller set of rows. For example Using the GROUP BY without any aggregate functions in the selected fields is in certain cases equal to using the DISTINCT modifier. The last two examples above produce the same resultsets. The optional OFFSET clause allows to ignore first N records. For example The above will produce only rows 11, 12, ... of the record set, if they exist. The value of the expression must a non negative integer, but not bigint or duration. The optional LIMIT clause allows to ignore all but first N records. For example The above will return at most the first 10 records of the record set. The value of the expression must a non negative integer, but not bigint or duration. The LIMIT and OFFSET clauses can be combined. For example Considering table t has, say 10 records, the above will produce only records 4 - 8. After returning record #8, no more result rows/records are computed. 1. The FROM clause is evaluated, producing a Cartesian product of its source record sets (tables or nested SELECT statements). 2. If present, the JOIN cluase is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation and the recordset specified by the JOIN clause. (... JOIN Recordset ON ...) 3. If present, the WHERE clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation. 4. If present, the GROUP BY clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 5. The SELECT field expressions are evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 6. If present, the DISTINCT modifier is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 7. If present, the ORDER BY clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 8. If present, the OFFSET clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). The offset expression is evaluated once for the first record produced by the previous evaluations. 9. If present, the LIMIT clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). The limit expression is evaluated once for the first record produced by the previous evaluations. Truncate table statements remove all records from a table. The table must exist. For example Update statements change values of fields in rows of a table. For example Note: The SET clause is optional. If any of the columns of the table were defined using the optional constraints clause or the optional defaults clause then those are processed on a per row basis. The details are discussed in the "Constraints and defaults" chapter below the CREATE TABLE statement documentation. To allow to query for DB meta data, there exist specially named tables, some of them being virtual. Note: Virtual system tables may have fake table-wise unique but meaningless and unstable record IDs. Do not apply the built-in id() to any system table. The table __Table lists all tables in the DB. The schema is The Schema column returns the statement to (re)create table Name. This table is virtual. The table __Colum lists all columns of all tables in the DB. The schema is The Ordinal column defines the 1-based index of the column in the record. This table is virtual. The table __Colum2 lists all columns of all tables in the DB which have the constraint NOT NULL or which have a constraint expression defined or which have a default expression defined. The schema is It's possible to obtain a consolidated recordset for all properties of all DB columns using The Name column is the column name in TableName. The table __Index lists all indices in the DB. The schema is The IsUnique columns reflects if the index was created using the optional UNIQUE clause. This table is virtual. Built-in functions are predeclared. The built-in aggregate function avg returns the average of values of an expression. Avg ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if avg is applied to an empty record set. The column values must be of a numeric type. The built-in function contains returns true if substr is within s. If any argument to contains is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in aggregate function count returns how many times an expression has a non NULL values or the number of rows in a record set. Note: count() returns 0 for an empty record set. For example Date returns the time corresponding to in the appropriate zone for that time in the given location. The month, day, hour, min, sec, and nsec values may be outside their usual ranges and will be normalized during the conversion. For example, October 32 converts to November 1. A daylight savings time transition skips or repeats times. For example, in the United States, March 13, 2011 2:15am never occurred, while November 6, 2011 1:15am occurred twice. In such cases, the choice of time zone, and therefore the time, is not well-defined. Date returns a time that is correct in one of the two zones involved in the transition, but it does not guarantee which. A location maps time instants to the zone in use at that time. Typically, the location represents the collection of time offsets in use in a geographical area, such as "CEST" and "CET" for central Europe. "local" represents the system's local time zone. "UTC" represents Universal Coordinated Time (UTC). The month specifies a month of the year (January = 1, ...). If any argument to date is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function day returns the day of the month specified by t. If the argument to day is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function formatTime returns a textual representation of the time value formatted according to layout, which defines the format by showing how the reference time, would be displayed if it were the value; it serves as an example of the desired output. The same display rules will then be applied to the time value. If any argument to formatTime is NULL the result is NULL. NOTE: The string value of the time zone, like "CET" or "ACDT", is dependent on the time zone of the machine the function is run on. For example, if the t value is in "CET", but the machine is in "ACDT", instead of "CET" the result is "+0100". This is the same what Go (time.Time).String() returns and in fact formatTime directly calls t.String(). returns on a machine in the CET time zone, but may return on a machine in the ACDT zone. The time value is in both cases the same so its ordering and comparing is correct. Only the display value can differ. The built-in functions formatFloat and formatInt format numbers to strings using go's number format functions in the `strconv` package. For all three functions, only the first argument is mandatory. The default values of the rest are shown in the examples. If the first argument is NULL, the result is NULL. returns returns returns Unlike the `strconv` equivalent, the formatInt function handles all integer types, both signed and unsigned. The built-in function hasPrefix tests whether the string s begins with prefix. If any argument to hasPrefix is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function hasSuffix tests whether the string s ends with suffix. If any argument to hasSuffix is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function hour returns the hour within the day specified by t, in the range [0, 23]. If the argument to hour is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function hours returns the duration as a floating point number of hours. If the argument to hours is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function id takes zero or one arguments. If no argument is provided, id() returns a table-unique automatically assigned numeric identifier of type int. Ids of deleted records are not reused unless the DB becomes completely empty (has no tables). For example If id() without arguments is called for a row which is not a table record then the result value is NULL. For example If id() has one argument it must be a table name of a table in a cross join. For example The built-in function len takes a string argument and returns the lentgh of the string in bytes. The expression len(s) is constant if s is a string constant. If the argument to len is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in aggregate function max returns the largest value of an expression in a record set. Max ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if max is applied to an empty record set. The expression values must be of an ordered type. For example The built-in aggregate function min returns the smallest value of an expression in a record set. Min ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if min is applied to an empty record set. For example The column values must be of an ordered type. The built-in function minute returns the minute offset within the hour specified by t, in the range [0, 59]. If the argument to minute is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function minutes returns the duration as a floating point number of minutes. If the argument to minutes is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function month returns the month of the year specified by t (January = 1, ...). If the argument to month is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function nanosecond returns the nanosecond offset within the second specified by t, in the range [0, 999999999]. If the argument to nanosecond is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function nanoseconds returns the duration as an integer nanosecond count. If the argument to nanoseconds is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function now returns the current local time. The built-in function parseTime parses a formatted string and returns the time value it represents. The layout defines the format by showing how the reference time, would be interpreted if it were the value; it serves as an example of the input format. The same interpretation will then be made to the input string. Elements omitted from the value are assumed to be zero or, when zero is impossible, one, so parsing "3:04pm" returns the time corresponding to Jan 1, year 0, 15:04:00 UTC (note that because the year is 0, this time is before the zero Time). Years must be in the range 0000..9999. The day of the week is checked for syntax but it is otherwise ignored. In the absence of a time zone indicator, parseTime returns a time in UTC. When parsing a time with a zone offset like -0700, if the offset corresponds to a time zone used by the current location, then parseTime uses that location and zone in the returned time. Otherwise it records the time as being in a fabricated location with time fixed at the given zone offset. When parsing a time with a zone abbreviation like MST, if the zone abbreviation has a defined offset in the current location, then that offset is used. The zone abbreviation "UTC" is recognized as UTC regardless of location. If the zone abbreviation is unknown, Parse records the time as being in a fabricated location with the given zone abbreviation and a zero offset. This choice means that such a time can be parses and reformatted with the same layout losslessly, but the exact instant used in the representation will differ by the actual zone offset. To avoid such problems, prefer time layouts that use a numeric zone offset. If any argument to parseTime is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function second returns the second offset within the minute specified by t, in the range [0, 59]. If the argument to second is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function seconds returns the duration as a floating point number of seconds. If the argument to seconds is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function since returns the time elapsed since t. It is shorthand for now()-t. If the argument to since is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in aggregate function sum returns the sum of values of an expression for all rows of a record set. Sum ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if sum is applied to an empty record set. The column values must be of a numeric type. The built-in function timeIn returns t with the location information set to loc. For discussion of the loc argument please see date(). If any argument to timeIn is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function weekday returns the day of the week specified by t. Sunday == 0, Monday == 1, ... If the argument to weekday is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function year returns the year in which t occurs. If the argument to year is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function yearDay returns the day of the year specified by t, in the range [1,365] for non-leap years, and [1,366] in leap years. If the argument to yearDay is NULL the result is NULL. Three functions assemble and disassemble complex numbers. The built-in function complex constructs a complex value from a floating-point real and imaginary part, while real and imag extract the real and imaginary parts of a complex value. The type of the arguments and return value correspond. For complex, the two arguments must be of the same floating-point type and the return type is the complex type with the corresponding floating-point constituents: complex64 for float32, complex128 for float64. The real and imag functions together form the inverse, so for a complex value z, z == complex(real(z), imag(z)). If the operands of these functions are all constants, the return value is a constant. If any argument to any of complex, real, imag functions is NULL the result is NULL. For the numeric types, the following sizes are guaranteed Portions of this specification page are modifications based on work[2] created and shared by Google[3] and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License[4]. This specification is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, and code is licensed under a BSD license[5]. Links from the above documentation This section is not part of the specification. WARNING: The implementation of indices is new and it surely needs more time to become mature. Indices are used currently used only by the WHERE clause. The following expression patterns of 'WHERE expression' are recognized and trigger index use. The relOp is one of the relation operators <, <=, ==, >=, >. For the equality operator both operands must be of comparable types. For all other operators both operands must be of ordered types. The constant expression is a compile time constant expression. Some constant folding is still a TODO. Parameter is a QL parameter ($1 etc.). Consider tables t and u, both with an indexed field f. The WHERE expression doesn't comply with the above simple detected cases. However, such query is now automatically rewritten to which will use both of the indices. The impact of using the indices can be substantial (cf. BenchmarkCrossJoin*) if the resulting rows have low "selectivity", ie. only few rows from both tables are selected by the respective WHERE filtering. Note: Existing QL DBs can be used and indices can be added to them. However, once any indices are present in the DB, the old QL versions cannot work with such DB anymore. Running a benchmark with -v (-test.v) outputs information about the scale used to report records/s and a brief description of the benchmark. For example Running the full suite of benchmarks takes a lot of time. Use the -timeout flag to avoid them being killed after the default time limit (10 minutes).
Command mox is a modern, secure, full-featured, open source mail server for low-maintenance self-hosted email. Mox is started with the "serve" subcommand, but mox also has many other subcommands. Many of those commands talk to a running mox instance, through the ctl file in the data directory. Specify the configuration file (that holds the path to the data directory) through the -config flag or MOXCONF environment variable. Commands that don't talk to a running mox instance are often for testing/debugging email functionality. For example for parsing an email message, or looking up SPF/DKIM/DMARC records. Below is the usage information as printed by the command when started without any parameters. Followed by the help and usage information for each command. Start mox, serving SMTP/IMAP/HTTPS. Incoming email is accepted over SMTP. Email can be retrieved by users using IMAP. HTTP listeners are started for the admin/account web interfaces, and for automated TLS configuration. Missing essential TLS certificates are immediately requested, other TLS certificates are requested on demand. Only implemented on unix systems, not Windows. Quickstart generates configuration files and prints instructions to quickly set up a mox instance. Quickstart writes configuration files, prints initial admin and account passwords, DNS records you should create. If you run it on Linux it writes a systemd service file and prints commands to enable and start mox as service. All output is written to quickstart.log for later reference. The user or uid is optional, defaults to "mox", and is the user or uid/gid mox will run as after initialization. Quickstart assumes mox will run on the machine you run quickstart on and uses its host name and public IPs. On many systems the hostname is not a fully qualified domain name, but only the first dns "label", e.g. "mail" in case of "mail.example.org". If so, quickstart does a reverse DNS lookup to find the hostname, and as fallback uses the label plus the domain of the email address you specified. Use flag -hostname to explicitly specify the hostname mox will run on. Mox is by far easiest to operate if you let it listen on port 443 (HTTPS) and 80 (HTTP). TLS will be fully automatic with ACME with Let's Encrypt. You can run mox along with an existing webserver, but because of MTA-STS and autoconfig, you'll need to forward HTTPS traffic for two domains to mox. Run "mox quickstart -existing-webserver ..." to generate configuration files and instructions for configuring mox along with an existing webserver. But please first consider configuring mox on port 443. It can itself serve domains with HTTP/HTTPS, including with automatic TLS with ACME, is easily configured through both configuration files and admin web interface, and can act as a reverse proxy (and static file server for that matter), so you can forward traffic to your existing backend applications. Look for "WebHandlers:" in the output of "mox config describe-domains" and see the output of "mox config example webhandlers". Shut mox down, giving connections maximum 3 seconds to stop before closing them. While shutting down, new IMAP and SMTP connections will get a status response indicating temporary unavailability. Existing connections will get a 3 second period to finish their transaction and shut down. Under normal circumstances, only IMAP has long-living connections, with the IDLE command to get notified of new mail deliveries. Set new password an account. The password is read from stdin. Secrets derived from the password, but not the password itself, are stored in the account database. The stored secrets are for authentication with: scram-sha-256, scram-sha-1, cram-md5, plain text (bcrypt hash). The parameter is an account name, as configured under Accounts in domains.conf and as present in the data/accounts/ directory, not a configured email address for an account. Set a new admin password, for the web interface. The password is read from stdin. Its bcrypt hash is stored in a file named "adminpasswd" in the configuration directory. Print the log levels, or set a new default log level, or a level for the given package. By default, a single log level applies to all logging in mox. But for each "pkg", an overriding log level can be configured. Examples of packages: smtpserver, smtpclient, queue, imapserver, spf, dkim, dmarc, junk, message, etc. Specify a pkg and an empty level to clear the configured level for a package. Valid labels: error, info, debug, trace, traceauth, tracedata. List hold rules for the delivery queue. Messages submitted to the queue that match a hold rule will be marked as on hold and not scheduled for delivery. Add hold rule for the delivery queue. Add a hold rule to mark matching newly submitted messages as on hold. Set the matching rules with the flags. Don't specify any flags to match all submitted messages. Remove hold rule for the delivery queue. Remove a hold rule by its id. List matching messages in the delivery queue. Prints the message with its ID, last and next delivery attempts, last error. Mark matching messages on hold. Messages that are on hold are not delivered until marked as off hold again, or otherwise handled by the admin. Mark matching messages off hold. Once off hold, messages can be delivered according to their current next delivery attempt. See the "queue schedule" command. Change next delivery attempt for matching messages. The next delivery attempt is adjusted by the duration parameter. If the -now flag is set, the new delivery attempt is set to the duration added to the current time, instead of added to the current scheduled time. Schedule immediate delivery with "mox queue schedule -now 0". Set transport for matching messages. By default, the routing rules determine how a message is delivered. The default and common case is direct delivery with SMTP. Messages can get a previously configured transport assigned to use for delivery, e.g. using submission to another mail server or with connections over a SOCKS proxy. Set TLS requirements for delivery of matching messages. Value "yes" is handled as if the RequireTLS extension was specified during submission. Value "no" is handled as if the message has a header "TLS-Required: No". This header is not added by the queue. If messages without this header are relayed through other mail servers they will apply their own default TLS policy. Value "default" is the default behaviour, currently for unverified opportunistic TLS. Fail delivery of matching messages, delivering DSNs. Failing a message is handled similar to how delivery is given up after all delivery attempts failed. The DSN (delivery status notification) message contains a line saying the message was canceled by the admin. Remove matching messages from the queue. Dangerous operation, this completely removes the message. If you want to store the message, use "queue dump" before removing. Dump a message from the queue. The message is printed to stdout and is in standard internet mail format. List matching messages in the retired queue. Prints messages with their ID and results. Print a message from the retired queue. Prints a JSON representation of the information from the retired queue. Print addresses in suppression list. Add address to suppression list for account. Remove address from suppression list for account. Check if address is present in suppression list, for any or specific account. List matching webhooks in the queue. Prints list of webhooks, their IDs and basic information. Change next delivery attempt for matching webhooks. The next delivery attempt is adjusted by the duration parameter. If the -now flag is set, the new delivery attempt is set to the duration added to the current time, instead of added to the current scheduled time. Schedule immediate delivery with "mox queue schedule -now 0". Fail delivery of matching webhooks. Print details of a webhook from the queue. The webhook is printed to stdout as JSON. List matching webhooks in the retired queue. Prints list of retired webhooks, their IDs and basic information. Print details of a webhook from the retired queue. The retired webhook is printed to stdout as JSON. Import a maildir into an account. The mbox/maildir archive is accessed and imported by the running mox process, so it must have access to the archive files. The default suggested systemd service file isolates mox from most of the file system, with only the "data/" directory accessible, so you may want to put the mbox/maildir archive files in a directory like "data/import/" to make it available to mox. By default, messages will train the junk filter based on their flags and, if "automatic junk flags" configuration is set, based on mailbox naming. If the destination mailbox is the Sent mailbox, the recipients of the messages are added to the message metadata, causing later incoming messages from these recipients to be accepted, unless other reputation signals prevent that. Users can also import mailboxes/messages through the account web page by uploading a zip or tgz file with mbox and/or maildirs. Messages are imported even if already present. Importing messages twice will result in duplicate messages. Mailbox flags, like "seen", "answered", will be imported. An optional dovecot-keywords file can specify additional flags, like Forwarded/Junk/NotJunk. Import an mbox into an account. Using mbox is not recommended, maildir is a better defined format. The mbox/maildir archive is accessed and imported by the running mox process, so it must have access to the archive files. The default suggested systemd service file isolates mox from most of the file system, with only the "data/" directory accessible, so you may want to put the mbox/maildir archive files in a directory like "data/import/" to make it available to mox. By default, messages will train the junk filter based on their flags and, if "automatic junk flags" configuration is set, based on mailbox naming. If the destination mailbox is the Sent mailbox, the recipients of the messages are added to the message metadata, causing later incoming messages from these recipients to be accepted, unless other reputation signals prevent that. Users can also import mailboxes/messages through the account web page by uploading a zip or tgz file with mbox and/or maildirs. Messages are imported even if already present. Importing messages twice will result in duplicate messages. Export one or all mailboxes from an account in maildir format. Export bypasses a running mox instance. It opens the account mailbox/message database file directly. This may block if a running mox instance also has the database open, e.g. for IMAP connections. To export from a running instance, use the accounts web page or webmail. Export messages from one or all mailboxes in an account in mbox format. Using mbox is not recommended. Maildir is a better format. Export bypasses a running mox instance. It opens the account mailbox/message database file directly. This may block if a running mox instance also has the database open, e.g. for IMAP connections. To export from a running instance, use the accounts web page or webmail. For mbox export, "mboxrd" is used where message lines starting with the magic "From " string are escaped by prepending a >. All ">*From " are escaped, otherwise reconstructing the original could lose a ">". Start a local SMTP/IMAP server that accepts all messages, useful when testing/developing software that sends email. Localserve starts mox with a configuration suitable for local email-related software development/testing. It listens for SMTP/Submission(s), IMAP(s) and HTTP(s), on the regular port numbers + 1000. Data is stored in the system user's configuration directory under "mox-localserve", e.g. $HOME/.config/mox-localserve/ on linux, but can be overridden with the -dir flag. If the directory does not yet exist, it is automatically initialized with configuration files, an account with email address mox@localhost and password moxmoxmox, and a newly generated self-signed TLS certificate. Incoming messages are delivered as normal, falling back to accepting and delivering to the mox account for unknown addresses. Submitted messages are added to the queue, which delivers by ignoring the destination servers, always connecting to itself instead. Recipient addresses with the following localpart suffixes are handled specially: - "temperror": fail with a temporary error code - "permerror": fail with a permanent error code - [45][0-9][0-9]: fail with the specific error code - "timeout": no response (for an hour) If the localpart begins with "mailfrom" or "rcptto", the error is returned during those commands instead of during "data". Prints help about matching commands. If multiple commands match, they are listed along with the first line of their help text. If a single command matches, its usage and full help text is printed. Creates a backup of the data directory. Backup creates consistent snapshots of the databases and message files and copies other files in the data directory. Empty directories are not copied. These files can then be stored elsewhere for long-term storage, or used to fall back to should an upgrade fail. Simply copying files in the data directory while mox is running can result in unusable database files. Message files never change (they are read-only, though can be removed) and are hard-linked so they don't consume additional space. If hardlinking fails, for example when the backup destination directory is on a different file system, a regular copy is made. Using a destination directory like "data/tmp/backup" increases the odds hardlinking succeeds: the default systemd service file specifically mounts the data directory, causing attempts to hardlink outside it to fail with an error about cross-device linking. All files in the data directory that aren't recognized (i.e. other than known database files, message files, an acme directory, the "tmp" directory, etc), are stored, but with a warning. Remove files in the destination directory before doing another backup. The backup command will not overwrite files, but print and return errors. Exit code 0 indicates the backup was successful. A clean successful backup does not print any output, but may print warnings. Use the -verbose flag for details, including timing. To restore a backup, first shut down mox, move away the old data directory and move an earlier backed up directory in its place, run "mox verifydata", possibly with the "-fix" option, and restart mox. After the restore, you may also want to run "mox bumpuidvalidity" for each account for which messages in a mailbox changed, to force IMAP clients to synchronize mailbox state. Before upgrading, to check if the upgrade will likely succeed, first make a backup, then use the new mox binary to run "mox verifydata" on the backup. This can change the backup files (e.g. upgrade database files, move away unrecognized message files), so you should make a new backup before actually upgrading. Verify the contents of a data directory, typically of a backup. Verifydata checks all database files to see if they are valid BoltDB/bstore databases. It checks that all messages in the database have a corresponding on-disk message file and there are no unrecognized files. If option -fix is specified, unrecognized message files are moved away. This may be needed after a restore, because messages enqueued or delivered in the future may get those message sequence numbers assigned and writing the message file would fail. Consistency of message/mailbox UID, UIDNEXT and UIDVALIDITY is verified as well. Because verifydata opens the database files, schema upgrades may automatically be applied. This can happen if you use a new mox release. It is useful to run "mox verifydata" with a new binary before attempting an upgrade, but only on a copy of the database files, as made with "mox backup". Before upgrading, make a new backup again since "mox verifydata" may have upgraded the database files, possibly making them potentially no longer readable by the previous version. Print licenses of mox source code and dependencies. Parses and validates the configuration files. If valid, the command exits with status 0. If not valid, all errors encountered are printed. Check the DNS records with the configuration for the domain, and print any errors/warnings. Prints annotated DNS records as zone file that should be created for the domain. The zone file can be imported into existing DNS software. You should review the DNS records, especially if your domain previously/currently has email configured. Prints an annotated empty configuration for use as domains.conf. The domains configuration file contains the domains and their configuration, and accounts and their configuration. This includes the configured email addresses. The mox admin web interface, and the mox command line interface, can make changes to this file. Mox automatically reloads this file when it changes. Like the static configuration, the example domains.conf printed by this command needs modifications to make it valid. Prints an annotated empty configuration for use as mox.conf. The static configuration file cannot be reloaded while mox is running. Mox has to be restarted for changes to the static configuration file to take effect. This configuration file needs modifications to make it valid. For example, it may contain unfinished list items. Add an account with an email address and reload the configuration. Email can be delivered to this address/account. A password has to be configured explicitly, see the setaccountpassword command. Remove an account and reload the configuration. Email addresses for this account will also be removed, and incoming email for these addresses will be rejected. All data for the account will be removed. Adds an address to an account and reloads the configuration. If address starts with a @ (i.e. a missing localpart), this is a catchall address for the domain. Remove an address and reload the configuration. Incoming email for this address will be rejected after removing an address. Adds a new domain to the configuration and reloads the configuration. The account is used for the postmaster mailboxes the domain, including as DMARC and TLS reporting. Localpart is the "username" at the domain for this account. If must be set if and only if account does not yet exist. Remove a domain from the configuration and reload the configuration. This is a dangerous operation. Incoming email delivery for this domain will be rejected. List TLS public keys for TLS client certificate authentication. If account is absent, the TLS public keys for all accounts are listed. Get a TLS public key for a fingerprint. Prints the type, name, account and address for the key, and the certificate in PEM format. Add a TLS public key to the account of the given address. The public key is read from the certificate. The optional name is a human-readable descriptive name of the key. If absent, the CommonName from the certificate is used. Remove TLS public key for fingerprint. Generate an ed25519 private key and minimal certificate for use a TLS public key and write to files starting with stem. The private key is written to $stem.$timestamp.ed25519privatekey.pkcs8.pem. The certificate is written to $stem.$timestamp.certificate.pem. The private key and certificate are also written to $stem.$timestamp.ed25519privatekey-certificate.pem. The certificate can be added to an account with "mox config account tlspubkey add". The combined file can be used with "mox sendmail". The private key is also written to standard error in raw-url-base64-encoded form, also for use with "mox sendmail". The fingerprint is written to standard error too, for reference. Show aliases (lists) for domain. Print settings and members of alias (list). Add new alias (list) with one or more addresses and public posting enabled. An alias is used for delivering incoming email to multiple recipients. If you want to add an address to an account, don't use an alias, just add the address to the account. Update alias (list) configuration. Remove alias (list). Add addresses to alias (list). Remove addresses from alias (list). Describe configuration for mox when invoked as sendmail. Prints a systemd unit service file for mox. This is the same file as generated using quickstart. If the systemd service file has changed with a newer version of mox, use this command to generate an up to date version. Ensure host private keys exist for TLS listeners with ACME. In mox.conf, each listener can have TLS configured. Long-lived private key files can be specified, which will be used when requesting ACME certificates. Configuring these private keys makes it feasible to publish DANE TLSA records for the corresponding public keys in DNS, protected with DNSSEC, allowing TLS certificate verification without depending on a list of Certificate Authorities (CAs). Previous versions of mox did not pre-generate private keys for use with ACME certificates, but would generate private keys on-demand. By explicitly configuring private keys, they will not change automatedly with new certificates, and the DNS TLSA records stay valid. This command looks for listeners in mox.conf with TLS with ACME configured. For each missing host private key (of type rsa-2048 and ecdsa-p256) a key is written to config/hostkeys/. If a certificate exists in the ACME "cache", its private key is copied. Otherwise a new private key is generated. Snippets for manually updating/editing mox.conf are printed. After running this command, and updating mox.conf, run "mox config dnsrecords" for a domain and create the TLSA DNS records it suggests to enable DANE. List available config examples, or print a specific example. Check if a newer version of mox is available. A single DNS TXT lookup to _updates.xmox.nl tells if a new version is available. If so, a changelog is fetched from https://updates.xmox.nl, and the individual entries verified with a builtin public key. The changelog is printed. Turn an ID from a Received header into a cid, for looking up in logs. A cid is essentially a connection counter initialized when mox starts. Each log line contains a cid. Received headers added by mox contain a unique ID that can be decrypted to a cid by admin of a mox instance only. Print the configuration for email clients for a domain. Sending email is typically not done on the SMTP port 25, but on submission ports 465 (with TLS) and 587 (without initial TLS, but usually added to the connection with STARTTLS). For IMAP, the port with TLS is 993 and without is 143. Without TLS/STARTTLS, passwords are sent in clear text, which should only be configured over otherwise secured connections, like a VPN. Dial the address using TLS with certificate verification using DANE. Data is copied between connection and stdin/stdout until either side closes the connection. Connect to MX server for domain using STARTTLS verified with DANE. If no destination host is specified, regular delivery logic is used to find the hosts to attempt delivery too. This involves following CNAMEs for the domain, looking up MX records, and possibly falling back to the domain name itself as host. If a destination host is specified, that is the only candidate host considered for dialing. With a list of destinations gathered, each is dialed until a successful SMTP session verified with DANE has been initialized, including EHLO and STARTTLS commands. Once connected, data is copied between connection and stdin/stdout, until either side closes the connection. This command follows the same logic as delivery attempts made from the queue, sharing most of its code. Print TLSA record for given certificate/key and parameters. Valid values: - usage: pkix-ta (0), pkix-ee (1), dane-ta (2), dane-ee (3) - selector: cert (0), spki (1) - matchtype: full (0), sha2-256 (1), sha2-512 (2) Common DANE TLSA record parameters are: dane-ee spki sha2-256, or 3 1 1, followed by a sha2-256 hash of the DER-encoded "SPKI" (subject public key info) from the certificate. An example DNS zone file entry: The first usable information from the pem file is used to compose the TLSA record. In case of selector "cert", a certificate is required. Otherwise the "subject public key info" (spki) of the first certificate or public or private key (pkcs#8, pkcs#1 or ec private key) is used. Lookup DNS name of given type. Lookup always prints whether the response was DNSSEC-protected. Examples: mox dns lookup ptr 1.1.1.1 mox dns lookup mx xmox.nl mox dns lookup txt _dmarc.xmox.nl. mox dns lookup tlsa _25._tcp.xmox.nl Generate a new ed25519 key for use with DKIM. Ed25519 keys are much smaller than RSA keys of comparable cryptographic strength. This is convenient because of maximum DNS message sizes. At the time of writing, not many mail servers appear to support ed25519 DKIM keys though, so it is recommended to sign messages with both RSA and ed25519 keys. Generate a new 2048 bit RSA private key for use with DKIM. The generated file is in PEM format, and has a comment it is generated for use with DKIM, by mox. Lookup and print the DKIM record for the selector at the domain. Print a DKIM DNS TXT record with the public key derived from the private key read from stdin. The DNS should be configured as a TXT record at $selector._domainkey.$domain. Verify the DKIM signatures in a message and print the results. The message is parsed, and the DKIM-Signature headers are validated. Validation of older messages may fail because the DNS records have been removed or changed by now, or because the signature header may have specified an expiration time that was passed. Sign a message, adding DKIM-Signature headers based on the domain in the From header. The message is parsed, the domain looked up in the configuration files, and DKIM-Signature headers generated. The message is printed with the DKIM-Signature headers prepended. Lookup dmarc policy for domain, a DNS TXT record at _dmarc.<domain>, validate and print it. Parse a DMARC report from an email message, and print its extracted details. DMARC reports are periodically mailed, if requested in the DMARC DNS record of a domain. Reports are sent by mail servers that received messages with our domain in a From header. This may or may not be legatimate email. DMARC reports contain summaries of evaluations of DMARC and DKIM/SPF, which can help understand email deliverability problems. Parse an email message and evaluate it against the DMARC policy of the domain in the From-header. mailfromaddress and helodomain are used for SPF validation. If both are empty, SPF validation is skipped. mailfromaddress should be the address used as MAIL FROM in the SMTP session. For DSN messages, that address may be empty. The helo domain was specified at the beginning of the SMTP transaction that delivered the message. These values can be found in message headers. For each reporting address in the domain's DMARC record, check if it has opted into receiving reports (if needed). A DMARC record can request reports about DMARC evaluations to be sent to an email/http address. If the organizational domains of that of the DMARC record and that of the report destination address do not match, the destination address must opt-in to receiving DMARC reports by creating a DMARC record at <dmarcdomain>._report._dmarc.<reportdestdomain>. Test if IP is in the DNS blocklist of the zone, e.g. bl.spamcop.net. If the IP is in the blocklist, an explanation is printed. This is typically a URL with more information. Check the health of the DNS blocklist represented by zone, e.g. bl.spamcop.net. The health of a DNS blocklist can be checked by querying for 127.0.0.1 and 127.0.0.2. The second must and the first must not be present. Lookup the MTASTS record and policy for the domain. MTA-STS is a mechanism for a domain to specify if it requires TLS connections for delivering email. If a domain has a valid MTA-STS DNS TXT record at _mta-sts.<domain> it signals it implements MTA-STS. A policy can then be fetched at https://mta-sts.<domain>/.well-known/mta-sts.txt. The policy specifies the mode (enforce, testing, none), which MX servers support TLS and should be used, and how long the policy can be cached. Recreate and retrain the junk filter for the account or all accounts. Useful after having made changes to the junk filter configuration, or if the implementation has changed. Sendmail is a drop-in replacement for /usr/sbin/sendmail to deliver emails sent by unix processes like cron. If invoked as "sendmail", it will act as sendmail for sending messages. Its intention is to let processes like cron send emails. Messages are submitted to an actual mail server over SMTP. The destination mail server and credentials are configured in /etc/moxsubmit.conf, see mox config describe-sendmail. The From message header is rewritten to the configured address. When the addressee appears to be a local user, because without @, the message is sent to the configured default address. If submitting an email fails, it is added to a directory moxsubmit.failures in the user's home directory. Most flags are ignored to fake compatibility with other sendmail implementations. A single recipient or the -t flag with a To-header is required. With the -t flag, Cc and Bcc headers are not handled specially, so Bcc is not removed and the addresses do not receive the email. /etc/moxsubmit.conf should be group-readable and not readable by others and this binary should be setgid that group: Check the status of IP for the policy published in DNS for the domain. IPs may be allowed to send for a domain, or disallowed, and several shades in between. If not allowed, an explanation may be provided by the policy. If so, the explanation is printed. The SPF mechanism that matched (if any) is also printed. Lookup the SPF record for the domain and print it. Parse the record as SPF record. If valid, nothing is printed. Lookup the TLSRPT record for the domain. A TLSRPT record typically contains an email address where reports about TLS connectivity should be sent. Mail servers attempting delivery to our domain should attempt to use TLS. TLSRPT lets them report how many connection successfully used TLS, and how what kind of errors occurred otherwise. Parse and print the TLSRPT in the message. The report is printed in formatted JSON. Prints this mox version. Lists available methods, prints request/response parameters for method, or calls a method with a request read from standard input. List available examples, or print a specific example. Change the IMAP UID validity of the mailbox, causing IMAP clients to refetch messages. This can be useful after manually repairing metadata about the account/mailbox. Opens account database file directly. Ensure mox does not have the account open, or is not running. Reassign UIDs in one mailbox or all mailboxes in an account and bump UID validity, causing IMAP clients to refetch messages. Opens account database file directly. Ensure mox does not have the account open, or is not running. Fix inconsistent UIDVALIDITY and UIDNEXT in messages/mailboxes/account. The next UID to use for a message in a mailbox should always be higher than any existing message UID in the mailbox. If it is not, the mailbox UIDNEXT is updated. Each mailbox has a UIDVALIDITY sequence number, which should always be lower than the per-account next UIDVALIDITY to use. If it is not, the account next UIDVALIDITY is updated. Opens account database file directly. Ensure mox does not have the account open, or is not running. Ensure message sizes in the database matching the sum of the message prefix length and on-disk file size. Messages with an inconsistent size are also parsed again. If an inconsistency is found, you should probably also run "mox bumpuidvalidity" on the mailboxes or entire account to force IMAP clients to refetch messages. Parse all messages in the account or all accounts again. Can be useful after upgrading mox with improved message parsing. Messages are parsed in batches, so other access to the mailboxes/messages are not blocked while reparsing all messages. Ensure messages in the database have a pre-parsed MIME form in the database. Recalculate message counts for all mailboxes in the account, and total message size for quota. When a message is added to/removed from a mailbox, or when message flags change, the total, unread, unseen and deleted messages are accounted, the total size of the mailbox, and the total message size for the account. In case of a bug in this accounting, the numbers could become incorrect. This command will find, fix and print them. Parse message, print JSON representation. Reassign message threads. For all accounts, or optionally only the specified account. Threading for all messages in an account is first reset, and new base subject and normalized message-id saved with the message. Then all messages are evaluated and matched against their parents/ancestors. Messages are matched based on the References header, with a fall-back to an In-Reply-To header, and if neither is present/valid, based only on base subject. A References header typically points to multiple previous messages in a hierarchy. From oldest ancestor to most recent parent. An In-Reply-To header would have only a message-id of the parent message. A message is only linked to a parent/ancestor if their base subject is the same. This ensures unrelated replies, with a new subject, are placed in their own thread. The base subject is lower cased, has whitespace collapsed to a single space, and some components removed: leading "Re:", "Fwd:", "Fw:", or bracketed tag (that mailing lists often add, e.g. "[listname]"), trailing "(fwd)", or enclosing "[fwd: ...]". Messages are linked to all their ancestors. If an intermediate parent/ancestor message is deleted in the future, the message can still be linked to the earlier ancestors. If the direct parent already wasn't available while matching, this is stored as the message having a "missing link" to its stored ancestors.
Multi-device Android Debug Bridge The madb command wraps Android Debug Bridge (adb) command line tool and provides various features for controlling multiple Android devices concurrently. Usage: The madb commands are: The madb flags are: The global flags are: Clears your app data from all devices. To specify which user's data should be cleared, use 'madb user set' command to set the default user ID for that device. (See 'madb help user' for more details.) Usage: <application_id> is usually the package name where the activities are defined. (See: http://tools.android.com/tech-docs/new-build-system/applicationid-vs-packagename) If the application ID is not specified, madb automatically determines which app to be cleared, based on the build scripts found in the current working directory. If the working directory contains a Gradle Android project (i.e., has "build.gradle"), run a small Gradle script to extract the application ID. In this case, the extracted ID is cached, so that "madb clear-data" can be repeated without even running the Gradle script again. The ID can be re-extracted by clearing the cache by providing "-clear-cache" flag. The madb clear-data flags are: Runs the provided adb command on all devices and emulators concurrently. For example, the following line: copies the ./foo.txt file to /sdcard/foo.txt for all the currently connected devices. There are a few pre-defined keywords that can be expanded within an argument. For example, the following line: copies the ./Alice.txt file to the device named Alice, and ./Bob.txt to the device named Bob. Note that you should type in "{{name}}" as-is, with the opening/closing curly braces, similar to when you're using a template library such as mustache. To see the list of available adb commands, type 'adb help'. Usage: <command> is a normal adb command, which will be executed on all devices and emulators. The madb exec flags are: Runs the provided external command for all devices and emulators concurrently. For each available device, this command will spawn a sub-shell with the ANDROID_SERIAL environmental variable set to the target device serial, and then will run the provided external command. There are a few pre-defined keywords that can be expanded within an argument. For example, the following line: prints out the name and serial pairs for each device. Note that you should type in "{{name}}" as-is, with the opening/closing curly braces, similar to when you're using a template library such as mustache. This command is intended to be used with external commands that are designed to work with only a single device at a time (e.g. gomobile, flutter). Usage: <external_command> is an external shell command to run for all devices and emulators. The madb extern flags are: Manages device groups, each of which can have one or more device members. The device groups can be used for specifying the target devices of other madb commands. Usage: The madb group commands are: Adds members to a device group. This command also creates the group, if the group does not exist yet. The device group can be used when specifying devices in any madb commands. When creating a new device group with this command, the provided name must not conflict with an existing device nickname (see: madb help name set). A group can contain another device group, in which case all the members of the other group will also be considered as members of the current group. Usage: <group_name> is an alpha-numeric string with no special characters or spaces. This name must not be an existing device nickname. <member> is a member specifier, which can be one of device serial, qualifier, device index (e.g., '@1', '@2'), device nickname, or another device group. Clears all the existing device groups. Usage: Deletes an existing device group. Usage: <group_name> the name of an existing device group. You can specify more than one group names. Lists the name and members of all the existing device groups. Usage: Removes members from an existing device group. If there are no remaining members after that, the group gets deleted. Usage: <group_name> is an alpha-numeric string with no special characters or spaces. This name must be an existing device group name. <member> is a member specifier, which can be one of device serial, qualifier, device index (e.g., '@1', '@2'), device nickname, or another device group. Renames an existing device group. Usage: <old_name> is the name of an existing device group. <new_name> is the new name for the existing group. This must be an alpha-numeric string with no special characters or spaces, and must not conflict with another existing device or group name. Installs your app on all devices. If the working directory contains a Gradle Android project (i.e., has "build.gradle"), this command will first run a small Gradle script to extract the variant properties, which will be used to find the best matching .apk for each device. These extracted properties are cached, and "madb install" can be repeated without running this Gradle script again. The properties can be re-extracted by clearing the cache by providing "-clear-cache" flag. Once the variant properties are extracted, the best matching .apk for each device will be installed in parallel. This command is similar to running "gradlew :<moduleName>:<variantName>Install", but "madb install" is more flexible: 1) you can install the app to a subset of the devices, and 2) the app is installed concurrently, which saves a lot of time. If the working directory contains a Flutter project (i.e., has "flutter.yaml"), this command will run "flutter install --device-id <device serial>" for all devices. To install your app for a specific user on a particular device, use 'madb user set' command to set the default user ID for that device. (See 'madb help user' for more details.) To install a specific .apk file to all devices, use "madb exec install <path_to_apk>" instead. Usage: The madb install flags are: Manages device nicknames, which are meant to be more human-friendly compared to the device serials provided by adb tool. Usage: The madb name commands are: Sets a human-friendly nickname that can be used when specifying the device in any madb commands. The device serial can be obtained using the 'adb devices -l' command. For example, consider the following example output: The first value, 'HT4BVWV00023', is the device serial. To assign a nickname for this device, run the following command: and it will assign the 'MyTablet' nickname to the device serial 'HT4BVWV00023'. The alternative device specifiers (e.g., 'usb:3-3.4.2', 'product:volantisg') can also have nicknames. When a nickname is set for a device serial, the nickname can be used to specify the device within madb commands. There can only be one nickname for a device serial. When the 'madb name set' command is invoked with a device serial with an already assigned nickname, the old one will be replaced with the newly provided one. Usage: <device_serial> is a device serial (e.g., 'HT4BVWV00023') or an alternative device qualifier (e.g., 'usb:3-3.4.2') obtained from 'adb devices -l' command <nickname> is an alpha-numeric string with no special characters or spaces. Unsets a nickname assigned by the 'madb name set' command. Either the device serial or the assigned nickname can be specified to remove the mapping. Usage: There should be only one argument, which is either the device serial or the nickname. Lists all the currently stored nicknames of device serials. Usage: Clears all the currently stored nicknames of device serials. Usage: Resolves the provided device specifiers and prints out their device serials, each in a separate line. This command only displays the unique serials of the devices that are currently available. This command can be useful when you want to use the device nicknames and groups defined by madb in other command line tools. For example, to run a flutter app on "MyTablet" device, you can use the following command (in Bash): Usage: <specifier> can be anything that is accepted in the '-n' flag (see 'madb help'). It can be a device serial, qualifier, index, nickname, or a device group name. Runs the provided adb shell command on all devices and emulators concurrently. This command is a shorthand syntax for 'madb exec shell <command...>'. See 'madb help exec' for more details. Usage: <command> is a normal adb shell command, which will be executed on all devices and emulators. The madb shell flags are: Launches your app on all devices. In most cases, running "madb start" from an Android Gradle project directory will do the right thing for you. "madb start" will build the project first. After the project build is completed, this command will install the best matching .apk for each device, only if one or more of the following conditions are met: If you would like to run the same version of the app repeatedly (e.g., for QA testing), you can explicitly turn off the build flag by providing "-build=false" to skip the build step. To run your app as a specific user on a particular device, use 'madb user set' command to set the default user ID for that device. (See 'madb help user' for more details.) Usage: <application_id> is usually the package name where the activities are defined. (See: http://tools.android.com/tech-docs/new-build-system/applicationid-vs-packagename) <activity_name> is the Java class name for the activity you want to launch. If the package name of the activity is different from the application ID, the activity name must be a fully-qualified name (e.g., com.yourcompany.yourapp.MainActivity). If either <application_id> or <activity_name> is provided, the other must be provided as well. If no arguments are specified, madb automatically determines which app to launch, based on the build scripts found in the current working directory. 1) If the working directory contains a Flutter project (i.e., has "flutter.yaml"), this command will run "flutter start --device-id <device serial>" for all the specified devices. 2) If the working directory contains a Gradle Android project (i.e., has "build.gradle"), this command will run a small Gradle script to extract the application ID and the main activity name. In this case, the extracted IDs are cached, so that "madb start" can be repeated without even running the Gradle script again. The IDs can be re-extracted by clearing the cache by providing "-clear-cache" flag. The madb start flags are: Stops your app on all devices. To stop your app for a specific user on a particular device, use 'madb user set' command to set the default user ID for that device. (See 'madb help user' for more details.) Usage: <application_id> is usually the package name where the activities are defined. (See: http://tools.android.com/tech-docs/new-build-system/applicationid-vs-packagename) If the application ID is not specified, madb automatically determines which app to stop, based on the build scripts found in the current working directory. 1) If the working directory contains a Flutter project (i.e., has "flutter.yaml"), this command will run "flutter stop --device-id <device serial>" for all the specified devices. 2) If the working directory contains a Gradle Android project (i.e., has "build.gradle"), run a small Gradle script to extract the application ID. In this case, the extracted ID is cached, so that "madb stop" can be repeated without even running the Gradle script again. The ID can be re-extracted by clearing the cache by providing "-clear-cache" flag. The madb stop flags are: Uninstall your app from all devices. To uninstall your app for a specific user on a particular device, use 'madb user set' command to set the default user ID for that device. (See 'madb help user' for more details.) Usage: <application_id> is usually the package name where the activities are defined. (See: http://tools.android.com/tech-docs/new-build-system/applicationid-vs-packagename) If the application_id is not specified, madb automatically determines which app to uninstall, based on the build scripts found in the current working directory. If the working directory contains a Gradle Android project (i.e., has "build.gradle"), run a small Gradle script to extract the application ID. In this case, the extracted ID is cached, so that "madb uninstall" can be repeated without even running the Gradle script again. The ID can be re-extracted by clearing the cache by providing "-clear-cache" flag. The madb uninstall flags are: Manages default user settings for each device. An Android device can have multiple user accounts, and each user account has a numeric ID associated with it. Certain adb commands accept '--user <user_id>' as a parameter to allow specifying which of the Android user account should be used when running the command. The default behavior when the user ID is not provided varies by the adb command being run. Some madb commands internally run these adb commands which accept the '--user' flag. You can let madb use different user IDs for different devices by storing the default user ID for each device using 'madb user set' command. If the default user ID is not set for a particular device, madb will not provide the '--user' flag to the underlying adb command, and the current user will be used for that device as a result. Below is the list of madb commands which are affected by the default user ID settings: For more details on how to obtain the user ID from an Android device, see 'madb user help set'. Usage: The madb user commands are: Sets a default user ID to be used for the specified device, when there are multiple user accounts on a single device. The user IDs can be obtained using the 'adb [<device_serial>] shell pm list users' command. Alternatively, you can use 'madb exec' if you want to specify the device with a nickname. For example, running the following command: will list the available users and their IDs on the MyPhone device. Consider the following example output: There are two available users, "John Doe" and "Work profile". Each user is assigned a "user ID", which appears on the left of the user name. In this case, the user ID of "John Doe" is "0", and the user ID of the "Work profile" is "10". To use the "Work profile" as the default user when running madb commands on this device, run the following command: and then madb will use "Work profile" as the default user for device "MyPhone" in any of the subsequence madb commands. Usage: <device_serial> is the unique serial number for the device, which can be obtained from 'adb devices'. <user_id> is one of the user IDs obtained from 'adb shell pm list users' command. Unsets the default user ID assigned by the 'madb user set' command for the specified device. Running this command without any device specifiers will unset the default users only for the currently available devices and emulators, while keeping the default user IDs for the other devices. Usage: <device_serial> is the unique serial number for the device, which can be obtained from 'adb devices'. Lists all the currently stored default user IDs for devices. Usage: Clears all the currently stored default user IDs for devices. This command clears the default user IDs regardless of whether the device is currently connected or not. Usage: Prints the madb version number to the console. If this version of madb binary is an official release, this command will show the version number. Otherwise, the version will be in the form of "<version>-develop", where the version indicates the most recent stable release version prior to this version of madb binary. Usage: Help with no args displays the usage of the parent command. Help with args displays the usage of the specified sub-command or help topic. "help ..." recursively displays help for all commands and topics. Usage: [command/topic ...] optionally identifies a specific sub-command or help topic. The madb help flags are:
Package ql implements a pure Go embedded SQL database engine. QL is a member of the SQL family of languages. It is less complex and less powerful than SQL (whichever specification SQL is considered to be). 2018-11-04: Back end file format V2 is now released. To use the new format for newly created databases set the FileFormat field in *Options passed to OpenFile to value 2 or use the driver named "ql2" instead of "ql". - Both the old and new driver will properly open and use, read and write the old (V1) or new file (V2) format of an existing database. - V1 format has a record size limit of ~64 kB. V2 format record size limit is math.MaxInt32. - V1 format uncommitted transaction size is limited by memory resources. V2 format uncommitted transaction is limited by free disk space. - A direct consequence of the previous is that small transactions perform better using V1 format and big transactions perform better using V2 format. - V2 format uses substantially less memory. 2018-08-02: Release v1.2.0 adds initial support for Go modules. 2017-01-10: Release v1.1.0 fixes some bugs and adds a configurable WAL headroom. 2016-07-29: Release v1.0.6 enables alternatively using = instead of == for equality operation. 2016-07-11: Release v1.0.5 undoes vendoring of lldb. QL now uses stable lldb (modernc.org/lldb). 2016-07-06: Release v1.0.4 fixes a panic when closing the WAL file. 2016-04-03: Release v1.0.3 fixes a data race. 2016-03-23: Release v1.0.2 vendors gitlab.com/cznic/exp/lldb and github.com/camlistore/go4/lock. 2016-03-17: Release v1.0.1 adjusts for latest goyacc. Parser error messages are improved and changed, but their exact form is not considered a API change. 2016-03-05: The current version has been tagged v1.0.0. 2015-06-15: To improve compatibility with other SQL implementations, the count built-in aggregate function now accepts * as its argument. 2015-05-29: The execution planner was rewritten from scratch. It should use indices in all places where they were used before plus in some additional situations. It is possible to investigate the plan using the newly added EXPLAIN statement. The QL tool is handy for such analysis. If the planner would have used an index, but no such exists, the plan includes hints in form of copy/paste ready CREATE INDEX statements. The planner is still quite simple and a lot of work on it is yet ahead. You can help this process by filling an issue with a schema and query which fails to use an index or indices when it should, in your opinion. Bonus points for including output of `ql 'explain <query>'`. 2015-05-09: The grammar of the CREATE INDEX statement now accepts an expression list instead of a single expression, which was further limited to just a column name or the built-in id(). As a side effect, composite indices are now functional. However, the values in the expression-list style index are not yet used by other statements or the statement/query planner. The composite index is useful while having UNIQUE clause to check for semantically duplicate rows before they get added to the table or when such a row is mutated using the UPDATE statement and the expression-list style index tuple of the row is thus recomputed. 2015-05-02: The Schema field of table __Table now correctly reflects any column constraints and/or defaults. Also, the (*DB).Info method now has that information provided in new ColumInfo fields NotNull, Constraint and Default. 2015-04-20: Added support for {LEFT,RIGHT,FULL} [OUTER] JOIN. 2015-04-18: Column definitions can now have constraints and defaults. Details are discussed in the "Constraints and defaults" chapter below the CREATE TABLE statement documentation. 2015-03-06: New built-in functions formatFloat and formatInt. Thanks urandom! (https://github.com/urandom) 2015-02-16: IN predicate now accepts a SELECT statement. See the updated "Predicates" section. 2015-01-17: Logical operators || and && have now alternative spellings: OR and AND (case insensitive). AND was a keyword before, but OR is a new one. This can possibly break existing queries. For the record, it's a good idea to not use any name appearing in, for example, [7] in your queries as the list of QL's keywords may expand for gaining better compatibility with existing SQL "standards". 2015-01-12: ACID guarantees were tightened at the cost of performance in some cases. The write collecting window mechanism, a formerly used implementation detail, was removed. Inserting rows one by one in a transaction is now slow. I mean very slow. Try to avoid inserting single rows in a transaction. Instead, whenever possible, perform batch updates of tens to, say thousands of rows in a single transaction. See also: http://www.sqlite.org/faq.html#q19, the discussed synchronization principles involved are the same as for QL, modulo minor details. Note: A side effect is that closing a DB before exiting an application, both for the Go API and through database/sql driver, is no more required, strictly speaking. Beware that exiting an application while there is an open (uncommitted) transaction in progress means losing the transaction data. However, the DB will not become corrupted because of not closing it. Nor that was the case before, but formerly failing to close a DB could have resulted in losing the data of the last transaction. 2014-09-21: id() now optionally accepts a single argument - a table name. 2014-09-01: Added the DB.Flush() method and the LIKE pattern matching predicate. 2014-08-08: The built in functions max and min now accept also time values. Thanks opennota! (https://github.com/opennota) 2014-06-05: RecordSet interface extended by new methods FirstRow and Rows. 2014-06-02: Indices on id() are now used by SELECT statements. 2014-05-07: Introduction of Marshal, Schema, Unmarshal. 2014-04-15: Added optional IF NOT EXISTS clause to CREATE INDEX and optional IF EXISTS clause to DROP INDEX. 2014-04-12: The column Unique in the virtual table __Index was renamed to IsUnique because the old name is a keyword. Unfortunately, this is a breaking change, sorry. 2014-04-11: Introduction of LIMIT, OFFSET. 2014-04-10: Introduction of query rewriting. 2014-04-07: Introduction of indices. QL imports zappy[8], a block-based compressor, which speeds up its performance by using a C version of the compression/decompression algorithms. If a CGO-free (pure Go) version of QL, or an app using QL, is required, please include 'purego' in the -tags option of go {build,get,install}. For example: If zappy was installed before installing QL, it might be necessary to rebuild zappy first (or rebuild QL with all its dependencies using the -a option): The syntax is specified using Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF) Lower-case production names are used to identify lexical tokens. Non-terminals are in CamelCase. Lexical tokens are enclosed in double quotes "" or back quotes “. The form a … b represents the set of characters from a through b as alternatives. The horizontal ellipsis … is also used elsewhere in the spec to informally denote various enumerations or code snippets that are not further specified. QL source code is Unicode text encoded in UTF-8. The text is not canonicalized, so a single accented code point is distinct from the same character constructed from combining an accent and a letter; those are treated as two code points. For simplicity, this document will use the unqualified term character to refer to a Unicode code point in the source text. Each code point is distinct; for instance, upper and lower case letters are different characters. Implementation restriction: For compatibility with other tools, the parser may disallow the NUL character (U+0000) in the statement. Implementation restriction: A byte order mark is disallowed anywhere in QL statements. The following terms are used to denote specific character classes The underscore character _ (U+005F) is considered a letter. Lexical elements are comments, tokens, identifiers, keywords, operators and delimiters, integer, floating-point, imaginary, rune and string literals and QL parameters. Line comments start with the character sequence // or -- and stop at the end of the line. A line comment acts like a space. General comments start with the character sequence /* and continue through the character sequence */. A general comment acts like a space. Comments do not nest. Tokens form the vocabulary of QL. There are four classes: identifiers, keywords, operators and delimiters, and literals. White space, formed from spaces (U+0020), horizontal tabs (U+0009), carriage returns (U+000D), and newlines (U+000A), is ignored except as it separates tokens that would otherwise combine into a single token. The formal grammar uses semicolons ";" as separators of QL statements. A single QL statement or the last QL statement in a list of statements can have an optional semicolon terminator. (Actually a separator from the following empty statement.) Identifiers name entities such as tables or record set columns. An identifier is a sequence of one or more letters and digits. The first character in an identifier must be a letter. For example No identifiers are predeclared, however note that no keyword can be used as an identifier. Identifiers starting with two underscores are used for meta data virtual tables names. For forward compatibility, users should generally avoid using any identifiers starting with two underscores. For example The following keywords are reserved and may not be used as identifiers. Keywords are not case sensitive. The following character sequences represent operators, delimiters, and other special tokens Operators consisting of more than one character are referred to by names in the rest of the documentation An integer literal is a sequence of digits representing an integer constant. An optional prefix sets a non-decimal base: 0 for octal, 0x or 0X for hexadecimal. In hexadecimal literals, letters a-f and A-F represent values 10 through 15. For example A floating-point literal is a decimal representation of a floating-point constant. It has an integer part, a decimal point, a fractional part, and an exponent part. The integer and fractional part comprise decimal digits; the exponent part is an e or E followed by an optionally signed decimal exponent. One of the integer part or the fractional part may be elided; one of the decimal point or the exponent may be elided. For example An imaginary literal is a decimal representation of the imaginary part of a complex constant. It consists of a floating-point literal or decimal integer followed by the lower-case letter i. For example A rune literal represents a rune constant, an integer value identifying a Unicode code point. A rune literal is expressed as one or more characters enclosed in single quotes. Within the quotes, any character may appear except single quote and newline. A single quoted character represents the Unicode value of the character itself, while multi-character sequences beginning with a backslash encode values in various formats. The simplest form represents the single character within the quotes; since QL statements are Unicode characters encoded in UTF-8, multiple UTF-8-encoded bytes may represent a single integer value. For instance, the literal 'a' holds a single byte representing a literal a, Unicode U+0061, value 0x61, while 'ä' holds two bytes (0xc3 0xa4) representing a literal a-dieresis, U+00E4, value 0xe4. Several backslash escapes allow arbitrary values to be encoded as ASCII text. There are four ways to represent the integer value as a numeric constant: \x followed by exactly two hexadecimal digits; \u followed by exactly four hexadecimal digits; \U followed by exactly eight hexadecimal digits, and a plain backslash \ followed by exactly three octal digits. In each case the value of the literal is the value represented by the digits in the corresponding base. Although these representations all result in an integer, they have different valid ranges. Octal escapes must represent a value between 0 and 255 inclusive. Hexadecimal escapes satisfy this condition by construction. The escapes \u and \U represent Unicode code points so within them some values are illegal, in particular those above 0x10FFFF and surrogate halves. After a backslash, certain single-character escapes represent special values All other sequences starting with a backslash are illegal inside rune literals. For example A string literal represents a string constant obtained from concatenating a sequence of characters. There are two forms: raw string literals and interpreted string literals. Raw string literals are character sequences between back quotes “. Within the quotes, any character is legal except back quote. The value of a raw string literal is the string composed of the uninterpreted (implicitly UTF-8-encoded) characters between the quotes; in particular, backslashes have no special meaning and the string may contain newlines. Carriage returns inside raw string literals are discarded from the raw string value. Interpreted string literals are character sequences between double quotes "". The text between the quotes, which may not contain newlines, forms the value of the literal, with backslash escapes interpreted as they are in rune literals (except that \' is illegal and \" is legal), with the same restrictions. The three-digit octal (\nnn) and two-digit hexadecimal (\xnn) escapes represent individual bytes of the resulting string; all other escapes represent the (possibly multi-byte) UTF-8 encoding of individual characters. Thus inside a string literal \377 and \xFF represent a single byte of value 0xFF=255, while ÿ, \u00FF, \U000000FF and \xc3\xbf represent the two bytes 0xc3 0xbf of the UTF-8 encoding of character U+00FF. For example These examples all represent the same string If the statement source represents a character as two code points, such as a combining form involving an accent and a letter, the result will be an error if placed in a rune literal (it is not a single code point), and will appear as two code points if placed in a string literal. Literals are assigned their values from the respective text representation at "compile" (parse) time. QL parameters provide the same functionality as literals, but their value is assigned at execution time from an expression list passed to DB.Run or DB.Execute. Using '?' or '$' is completely equivalent. For example Keywords 'false' and 'true' (not case sensitive) represent the two possible constant values of type bool (also not case sensitive). Keyword 'NULL' (not case sensitive) represents an untyped constant which is assignable to any type. NULL is distinct from any other value of any type. A type determines the set of values and operations specific to values of that type. A type is specified by a type name. Named instances of the boolean, numeric, and string types are keywords. The names are not case sensitive. Note: The blob type is exchanged between the back end and the API as []byte. On 32 bit platforms this limits the size which the implementation can handle to 2G. A boolean type represents the set of Boolean truth values denoted by the predeclared constants true and false. The predeclared boolean type is bool. A duration type represents the elapsed time between two instants as an int64 nanosecond count. The representation limits the largest representable duration to approximately 290 years. A numeric type represents sets of integer or floating-point values. The predeclared architecture-independent numeric types are The value of an n-bit integer is n bits wide and represented using two's complement arithmetic. Conversions are required when different numeric types are mixed in an expression or assignment. A string type represents the set of string values. A string value is a (possibly empty) sequence of bytes. The case insensitive keyword for the string type is 'string'. The length of a string (its size in bytes) can be discovered using the built-in function len. A time type represents an instant in time with nanosecond precision. Each time has associated with it a location, consulted when computing the presentation form of the time. The following functions are implicitly declared An expression specifies the computation of a value by applying operators and functions to operands. Operands denote the elementary values in an expression. An operand may be a literal, a (possibly qualified) identifier denoting a constant or a function or a table/record set column, or a parenthesized expression. A qualified identifier is an identifier qualified with a table/record set name prefix. For example Primary expression are the operands for unary and binary expressions. For example A primary expression of the form denotes the element of a string indexed by x. Its type is byte. The value x is called the index. The following rules apply - The index x must be of integer type except bigint or duration; it is in range if 0 <= x < len(s), otherwise it is out of range. - A constant index must be non-negative and representable by a value of type int. - A constant index must be in range if the string a is a literal. - If x is out of range at run time, a run-time error occurs. - s[x] is the byte at index x and the type of s[x] is byte. If s is NULL or x is NULL then the result is NULL. Otherwise s[x] is illegal. For a string, the primary expression constructs a substring. The indices low and high select which elements appear in the result. The result has indices starting at 0 and length equal to high - low. For convenience, any of the indices may be omitted. A missing low index defaults to zero; a missing high index defaults to the length of the sliced operand The indices low and high are in range if 0 <= low <= high <= len(a), otherwise they are out of range. A constant index must be non-negative and representable by a value of type int. If both indices are constant, they must satisfy low <= high. If the indices are out of range at run time, a run-time error occurs. Integer values of type bigint or duration cannot be used as indices. If s is NULL the result is NULL. If low or high is not omitted and is NULL then the result is NULL. Given an identifier f denoting a predeclared function, calls f with arguments a1, a2, … an. Arguments are evaluated before the function is called. The type of the expression is the result type of f. In a function call, the function value and arguments are evaluated in the usual order. After they are evaluated, the parameters of the call are passed by value to the function and the called function begins execution. The return value of the function is passed by value when the function returns. Calling an undefined function causes a compile-time error. Operators combine operands into expressions. Comparisons are discussed elsewhere. For other binary operators, the operand types must be identical unless the operation involves shifts or untyped constants. For operations involving constants only, see the section on constant expressions. Except for shift operations, if one operand is an untyped constant and the other operand is not, the constant is converted to the type of the other operand. The right operand in a shift expression must have unsigned integer type or be an untyped constant that can be converted to unsigned integer type. If the left operand of a non-constant shift expression is an untyped constant, the type of the constant is what it would be if the shift expression were replaced by its left operand alone. Expressions of the form yield a boolean value true if expr2, a regular expression, matches expr1 (see also [6]). Both expression must be of type string. If any one of the expressions is NULL the result is NULL. Predicates are special form expressions having a boolean result type. Expressions of the form are equivalent, including NULL handling, to The types of involved expressions must be comparable as defined in "Comparison operators". Another form of the IN predicate creates the expression list from a result of a SelectStmt. The SelectStmt must select only one column. The produced expression list is resource limited by the memory available to the process. NULL values produced by the SelectStmt are ignored, but if all records of the SelectStmt are NULL the predicate yields NULL. The select statement is evaluated only once. If the type of expr is not the same as the type of the field returned by the SelectStmt then the set operation yields false. The type of the column returned by the SelectStmt must be one of the simple (non blob-like) types: Expressions of the form are equivalent, including NULL handling, to The types of involved expressions must be ordered as defined in "Comparison operators". Expressions of the form yield a boolean value true if expr does not have a specific type (case A) or if expr has a specific type (case B). In other cases the result is a boolean value false. Unary operators have the highest precedence. There are five precedence levels for binary operators. Multiplication operators bind strongest, followed by addition operators, comparison operators, && (logical AND), and finally || (logical OR) Binary operators of the same precedence associate from left to right. For instance, x / y * z is the same as (x / y) * z. Note that the operator precedence is reflected explicitly by the grammar. Arithmetic operators apply to numeric values and yield a result of the same type as the first operand. The four standard arithmetic operators (+, -, *, /) apply to integer, rational, floating-point, and complex types; + also applies to strings; +,- also applies to times. All other arithmetic operators apply to integers only. sum integers, rationals, floats, complex values, strings difference integers, rationals, floats, complex values, times product integers, rationals, floats, complex values / quotient integers, rationals, floats, complex values % remainder integers & bitwise AND integers | bitwise OR integers ^ bitwise XOR integers &^ bit clear (AND NOT) integers << left shift integer << unsigned integer >> right shift integer >> unsigned integer Strings can be concatenated using the + operator String addition creates a new string by concatenating the operands. A value of type duration can be added to or subtracted from a value of type time. Times can subtracted from each other producing a value of type duration. For two integer values x and y, the integer quotient q = x / y and remainder r = x % y satisfy the following relationships with x / y truncated towards zero ("truncated division"). As an exception to this rule, if the dividend x is the most negative value for the int type of x, the quotient q = x / -1 is equal to x (and r = 0). If the divisor is a constant expression, it must not be zero. If the divisor is zero at run time, a run-time error occurs. If the dividend is non-negative and the divisor is a constant power of 2, the division may be replaced by a right shift, and computing the remainder may be replaced by a bitwise AND operation The shift operators shift the left operand by the shift count specified by the right operand. They implement arithmetic shifts if the left operand is a signed integer and logical shifts if it is an unsigned integer. There is no upper limit on the shift count. Shifts behave as if the left operand is shifted n times by 1 for a shift count of n. As a result, x << 1 is the same as x*2 and x >> 1 is the same as x/2 but truncated towards negative infinity. For integer operands, the unary operators +, -, and ^ are defined as follows For floating-point and complex numbers, +x is the same as x, while -x is the negation of x. The result of a floating-point or complex division by zero is not specified beyond the IEEE-754 standard; whether a run-time error occurs is implementation-specific. Whenever any operand of any arithmetic operation, unary or binary, is NULL, as well as in the case of the string concatenating operation, the result is NULL. For unsigned integer values, the operations +, -, *, and << are computed modulo 2n, where n is the bit width of the unsigned integer's type. Loosely speaking, these unsigned integer operations discard high bits upon overflow, and expressions may rely on “wrap around”. For signed integers with a finite bit width, the operations +, -, *, and << may legally overflow and the resulting value exists and is deterministically defined by the signed integer representation, the operation, and its operands. No exception is raised as a result of overflow. An evaluator may not optimize an expression under the assumption that overflow does not occur. For instance, it may not assume that x < x + 1 is always true. Integers of type bigint and rationals do not overflow but their handling is limited by the memory resources available to the program. Comparison operators compare two operands and yield a boolean value. In any comparison, the first operand must be of same type as is the second operand, or vice versa. The equality operators == and != apply to operands that are comparable. The ordering operators <, <=, >, and >= apply to operands that are ordered. These terms and the result of the comparisons are defined as follows - Boolean values are comparable. Two boolean values are equal if they are either both true or both false. - Complex values are comparable. Two complex values u and v are equal if both real(u) == real(v) and imag(u) == imag(v). - Integer values are comparable and ordered, in the usual way. Note that durations are integers. - Floating point values are comparable and ordered, as defined by the IEEE-754 standard. - Rational values are comparable and ordered, in the usual way. - String and Blob values are comparable and ordered, lexically byte-wise. - Time values are comparable and ordered. Whenever any operand of any comparison operation is NULL, the result is NULL. Note that slices are always of type string. Logical operators apply to boolean values and yield a boolean result. The right operand is evaluated conditionally. The truth tables for logical operations with NULL values Conversions are expressions of the form T(x) where T is a type and x is an expression that can be converted to type T. A constant value x can be converted to type T in any of these cases: - x is representable by a value of type T. - x is a floating-point constant, T is a floating-point type, and x is representable by a value of type T after rounding using IEEE 754 round-to-even rules. The constant T(x) is the rounded value. - x is an integer constant and T is a string type. The same rule as for non-constant x applies in this case. Converting a constant yields a typed constant as result. A non-constant value x can be converted to type T in any of these cases: - x has type T. - x's type and T are both integer or floating point types. - x's type and T are both complex types. - x is an integer, except bigint or duration, and T is a string type. Specific rules apply to (non-constant) conversions between numeric types or to and from a string type. These conversions may change the representation of x and incur a run-time cost. All other conversions only change the type but not the representation of x. A conversion of NULL to any type yields NULL. For the conversion of non-constant numeric values, the following rules apply 1. When converting between integer types, if the value is a signed integer, it is sign extended to implicit infinite precision; otherwise it is zero extended. It is then truncated to fit in the result type's size. For example, if v == uint16(0x10F0), then uint32(int8(v)) == 0xFFFFFFF0. The conversion always yields a valid value; there is no indication of overflow. 2. When converting a floating-point number to an integer, the fraction is discarded (truncation towards zero). 3. When converting an integer or floating-point number to a floating-point type, or a complex number to another complex type, the result value is rounded to the precision specified by the destination type. For instance, the value of a variable x of type float32 may be stored using additional precision beyond that of an IEEE-754 32-bit number, but float32(x) represents the result of rounding x's value to 32-bit precision. Similarly, x + 0.1 may use more than 32 bits of precision, but float32(x + 0.1) does not. In all non-constant conversions involving floating-point or complex values, if the result type cannot represent the value the conversion succeeds but the result value is implementation-dependent. 1. Converting a signed or unsigned integer value to a string type yields a string containing the UTF-8 representation of the integer. Values outside the range of valid Unicode code points are converted to "\uFFFD". 2. Converting a blob to a string type yields a string whose successive bytes are the elements of the blob. 3. Converting a value of a string type to a blob yields a blob whose successive elements are the bytes of the string. 4. Converting a value of a bigint type to a string yields a string containing the decimal decimal representation of the integer. 5. Converting a value of a string type to a bigint yields a bigint value containing the integer represented by the string value. A prefix of “0x” or “0X” selects base 16; the “0” prefix selects base 8, and a “0b” or “0B” prefix selects base 2. Otherwise the value is interpreted in base 10. An error occurs if the string value is not in any valid format. 6. Converting a value of a rational type to a string yields a string containing the decimal decimal representation of the rational in the form "a/b" (even if b == 1). 7. Converting a value of a string type to a bigrat yields a bigrat value containing the rational represented by the string value. The string can be given as a fraction "a/b" or as a floating-point number optionally followed by an exponent. An error occurs if the string value is not in any valid format. 8. Converting a value of a duration type to a string returns a string representing the duration in the form "72h3m0.5s". Leading zero units are omitted. As a special case, durations less than one second format using a smaller unit (milli-, micro-, or nanoseconds) to ensure that the leading digit is non-zero. The zero duration formats as 0, with no unit. 9. Converting a string value to a duration yields a duration represented by the string. A duration string is a possibly signed sequence of decimal numbers, each with optional fraction and a unit suffix, such as "300ms", "-1.5h" or "2h45m". Valid time units are "ns", "us" (or "µs"), "ms", "s", "m", "h". 10. Converting a time value to a string returns the time formatted using the format string When evaluating the operands of an expression or of function calls, operations are evaluated in lexical left-to-right order. For example, in the evaluation of the function calls and evaluation of c happen in the order h(), i(), j(), c. Floating-point operations within a single expression are evaluated according to the associativity of the operators. Explicit parentheses affect the evaluation by overriding the default associativity. In the expression x + (y + z) the addition y + z is performed before adding x. Statements control execution. The empty statement does nothing. Alter table statements modify existing tables. With the ADD clause it adds a new column to the table. The column must not exist. With the DROP clause it removes an existing column from a table. The column must exist and it must be not the only (last) column of the table. IOW, there cannot be a table with no columns. For example When adding a column to a table with existing data, the constraint clause of the ColumnDef cannot be used. Adding a constrained column to an empty table is fine. Begin transactions statements introduce a new transaction level. Every transaction level must be eventually balanced by exactly one of COMMIT or ROLLBACK statements. Note that when a transaction is roll-backed because of a statement failure then no explicit balancing of the respective BEGIN TRANSACTION is statement is required nor permitted. Failure to properly balance any opened transaction level may cause dead locks and/or lose of data updated in the uppermost opened but never properly closed transaction level. For example A database cannot be updated (mutated) outside of a transaction. Statements requiring a transaction A database is effectively read only outside of a transaction. Statements not requiring a transaction The commit statement closes the innermost transaction nesting level. If that's the outermost level then the updates to the DB made by the transaction are atomically made persistent. For example Create index statements create new indices. Index is a named projection of ordered values of a table column to the respective records. As a special case the id() of the record can be indexed. Index name must not be the same as any of the existing tables and it also cannot be the same as of any column name of the table the index is on. For example Now certain SELECT statements may use the indices to speed up joins and/or to speed up record set filtering when the WHERE clause is used; or the indices might be used to improve the performance when the ORDER BY clause is present. The UNIQUE modifier requires the indexed values tuple to be index-wise unique or have all values NULL. The optional IF NOT EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the index already exists. A simple index consists of only one expression which must be either a column name or the built-in id(). A more complex and more general index is one that consists of more than one expression or its single expression does not qualify as a simple index. In this case the type of all expressions in the list must be one of the non blob-like types. Note: Blob-like types are blob, bigint, bigrat, time and duration. Create table statements create new tables. A column definition declares the column name and type. Table names and column names are case sensitive. Neither a table or an index of the same name may exist in the DB. For example The optional IF NOT EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the table already exists. The optional constraint clause has two forms. The first one is found in many SQL dialects. This form prevents the data in column DepartmentName to be NULL. The second form allows an arbitrary boolean expression to be used to validate the column. If the value of the expression is true then the validation succeeded. If the value of the expression is false or NULL then the validation fails. If the value of the expression is not of type bool an error occurs. The optional DEFAULT clause is an expression which, if present, is substituted instead of a NULL value when the colum is assigned a value. Note that the constraint and/or default expressions may refer to other columns by name: When a table row is inserted by the INSERT INTO statement or when a table row is updated by the UPDATE statement, the order of operations is as follows: 1. The new values of the affected columns are set and the values of all the row columns become the named values which can be referred to in default expressions evaluated in step 2. 2. If any row column value is NULL and the DEFAULT clause is present in the column's definition, the default expression is evaluated and its value is set as the respective column value. 3. The values, potentially updated, of row columns become the named values which can be referred to in constraint expressions evaluated during step 4. 4. All row columns which definition has the constraint clause present will have that constraint checked. If any constraint violation is detected, the overall operation fails and no changes to the table are made. Delete from statements remove rows from a table, which must exist. For example If the WHERE clause is not present then all rows are removed and the statement is equivalent to the TRUNCATE TABLE statement. Drop index statements remove indices from the DB. The index must exist. For example The optional IF EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the index does not exist. Drop table statements remove tables from the DB. The table must exist. For example The optional IF EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the table does not exist. Insert into statements insert new rows into tables. New rows come from literal data, if using the VALUES clause, or are a result of select statement. In the later case the select statement is fully evaluated before the insertion of any rows is performed, allowing to insert values calculated from the same table rows are to be inserted into. If the ColumnNameList part is omitted then the number of values inserted in the row must be the same as are columns in the table. If the ColumnNameList part is present then the number of values per row must be same as the same number of column names. All other columns of the record are set to NULL. The type of the value assigned to a column must be the same as is the column's type or the value must be NULL. For example If any of the columns of the table were defined using the optional constraints clause or the optional defaults clause then those are processed on a per row basis. The details are discussed in the "Constraints and defaults" chapter below the CREATE TABLE statement documentation. Explain statement produces a recordset consisting of lines of text which describe the execution plan of a statement, if any. For example, the QL tool treats the explain statement specially and outputs the joined lines: The explanation may aid in uderstanding how a statement/query would be executed and if indices are used as expected - or which indices may possibly improve the statement performance. The create index statements above were directly copy/pasted in the terminal from the suggestions provided by the filter recordset pipeline part returned by the explain statement. If the statement has nothing special in its plan, the result is the original statement. To get an explanation of the select statement of the IN predicate, use the EXPLAIN statement with that particular select statement. The rollback statement closes the innermost transaction nesting level discarding any updates to the DB made by it. If that's the outermost level then the effects on the DB are as if the transaction never happened. For example The (temporary) record set from the last statement is returned and can be processed by the client. In this case the rollback is the same as 'DROP TABLE tmp;' but it can be a more complex operation. Select from statements produce recordsets. The optional DISTINCT modifier ensures all rows in the result recordset are unique. Either all of the resulting fields are returned ('*') or only those named in FieldList. RecordSetList is a list of table names or parenthesized select statements, optionally (re)named using the AS clause. The result can be filtered using a WhereClause and orderd by the OrderBy clause. For example If Recordset is a nested, parenthesized SelectStmt then it must be given a name using the AS clause if its field are to be accessible in expressions. A field is an named expression. Identifiers, not used as a type in conversion or a function name in the Call clause, denote names of (other) fields, values of which should be used in the expression. The expression can be named using the AS clause. If the AS clause is not present and the expression consists solely of a field name, then that field name is used as the name of the resulting field. Otherwise the field is unnamed. For example The SELECT statement can optionally enumerate the desired/resulting fields in a list. No two identical field names can appear in the list. When more than one record set is used in the FROM clause record set list, the result record set field names are rewritten to be qualified using the record set names. If a particular record set doesn't have a name, its respective fields became unnamed. The optional JOIN clause, for example is mostly equal to except that the rows from a which, when they appear in the cross join, never made expr to evaluate to true, are combined with a virtual row from b, containing all nulls, and added to the result set. For the RIGHT JOIN variant the discussed rules are used for rows from b not satisfying expr == true and the virtual, all-null row "comes" from a. The FULL JOIN adds the respective rows which would be otherwise provided by the separate executions of the LEFT JOIN and RIGHT JOIN variants. For more thorough OUTER JOIN discussion please see the Wikipedia article at [10]. Resultins rows of a SELECT statement can be optionally ordered by the ORDER BY clause. Collating proceeds by considering the expressions in the expression list left to right until a collating order is determined. Any possibly remaining expressions are not evaluated. All of the expression values must yield an ordered type or NULL. Ordered types are defined in "Comparison operators". Collating of elements having a NULL value is different compared to what the comparison operators yield in expression evaluation (NULL result instead of a boolean value). Below, T denotes a non NULL value of any QL type. NULL collates before any non NULL value (is considered smaller than T). Two NULLs have no collating order (are considered equal). The WHERE clause restricts records considered by some statements, like SELECT FROM, DELETE FROM, or UPDATE. It is an error if the expression evaluates to a non null value of non bool type. Another form of the WHERE clause is an existence predicate of a parenthesized select statement. The EXISTS form evaluates to true if the parenthesized SELECT statement produces a non empty record set. The NOT EXISTS form evaluates to true if the parenthesized SELECT statement produces an empty record set. The parenthesized SELECT statement is evaluated only once (TODO issue #159). The GROUP BY clause is used to project rows having common values into a smaller set of rows. For example Using the GROUP BY without any aggregate functions in the selected fields is in certain cases equal to using the DISTINCT modifier. The last two examples above produce the same resultsets. The optional OFFSET clause allows to ignore first N records. For example The above will produce only rows 11, 12, ... of the record set, if they exist. The value of the expression must a non negative integer, but not bigint or duration. The optional LIMIT clause allows to ignore all but first N records. For example The above will return at most the first 10 records of the record set. The value of the expression must a non negative integer, but not bigint or duration. The LIMIT and OFFSET clauses can be combined. For example Considering table t has, say 10 records, the above will produce only records 4 - 8. After returning record #8, no more result rows/records are computed. 1. The FROM clause is evaluated, producing a Cartesian product of its source record sets (tables or nested SELECT statements). 2. If present, the JOIN cluase is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation and the recordset specified by the JOIN clause. (... JOIN Recordset ON ...) 3. If present, the WHERE clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation. 4. If present, the GROUP BY clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 5. The SELECT field expressions are evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 6. If present, the DISTINCT modifier is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 7. If present, the ORDER BY clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 8. If present, the OFFSET clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). The offset expression is evaluated once for the first record produced by the previous evaluations. 9. If present, the LIMIT clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). The limit expression is evaluated once for the first record produced by the previous evaluations. Truncate table statements remove all records from a table. The table must exist. For example Update statements change values of fields in rows of a table. For example Note: The SET clause is optional. If any of the columns of the table were defined using the optional constraints clause or the optional defaults clause then those are processed on a per row basis. The details are discussed in the "Constraints and defaults" chapter below the CREATE TABLE statement documentation. To allow to query for DB meta data, there exist specially named tables, some of them being virtual. Note: Virtual system tables may have fake table-wise unique but meaningless and unstable record IDs. Do not apply the built-in id() to any system table. The table __Table lists all tables in the DB. The schema is The Schema column returns the statement to (re)create table Name. This table is virtual. The table __Colum lists all columns of all tables in the DB. The schema is The Ordinal column defines the 1-based index of the column in the record. This table is virtual. The table __Colum2 lists all columns of all tables in the DB which have the constraint NOT NULL or which have a constraint expression defined or which have a default expression defined. The schema is It's possible to obtain a consolidated recordset for all properties of all DB columns using The Name column is the column name in TableName. The table __Index lists all indices in the DB. The schema is The IsUnique columns reflects if the index was created using the optional UNIQUE clause. This table is virtual. Built-in functions are predeclared. The built-in aggregate function avg returns the average of values of an expression. Avg ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if avg is applied to an empty record set. The column values must be of a numeric type. The built-in function contains returns true if substr is within s. If any argument to contains is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in aggregate function count returns how many times an expression has a non NULL values or the number of rows in a record set. Note: count() returns 0 for an empty record set. For example Date returns the time corresponding to in the appropriate zone for that time in the given location. The month, day, hour, min, sec, and nsec values may be outside their usual ranges and will be normalized during the conversion. For example, October 32 converts to November 1. A daylight savings time transition skips or repeats times. For example, in the United States, March 13, 2011 2:15am never occurred, while November 6, 2011 1:15am occurred twice. In such cases, the choice of time zone, and therefore the time, is not well-defined. Date returns a time that is correct in one of the two zones involved in the transition, but it does not guarantee which. A location maps time instants to the zone in use at that time. Typically, the location represents the collection of time offsets in use in a geographical area, such as "CEST" and "CET" for central Europe. "local" represents the system's local time zone. "UTC" represents Universal Coordinated Time (UTC). The month specifies a month of the year (January = 1, ...). If any argument to date is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function day returns the day of the month specified by t. If the argument to day is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function formatTime returns a textual representation of the time value formatted according to layout, which defines the format by showing how the reference time, would be displayed if it were the value; it serves as an example of the desired output. The same display rules will then be applied to the time value. If any argument to formatTime is NULL the result is NULL. NOTE: The string value of the time zone, like "CET" or "ACDT", is dependent on the time zone of the machine the function is run on. For example, if the t value is in "CET", but the machine is in "ACDT", instead of "CET" the result is "+0100". This is the same what Go (time.Time).String() returns and in fact formatTime directly calls t.String(). returns on a machine in the CET time zone, but may return on a machine in the ACDT zone. The time value is in both cases the same so its ordering and comparing is correct. Only the display value can differ. The built-in functions formatFloat and formatInt format numbers to strings using go's number format functions in the `strconv` package. For all three functions, only the first argument is mandatory. The default values of the rest are shown in the examples. If the first argument is NULL, the result is NULL. returns returns returns Unlike the `strconv` equivalent, the formatInt function handles all integer types, both signed and unsigned. The built-in function hasPrefix tests whether the string s begins with prefix. If any argument to hasPrefix is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function hasSuffix tests whether the string s ends with suffix. If any argument to hasSuffix is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function hour returns the hour within the day specified by t, in the range [0, 23]. If the argument to hour is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function hours returns the duration as a floating point number of hours. If the argument to hours is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function id takes zero or one arguments. If no argument is provided, id() returns a table-unique automatically assigned numeric identifier of type int. Ids of deleted records are not reused unless the DB becomes completely empty (has no tables). For example If id() without arguments is called for a row which is not a table record then the result value is NULL. For example If id() has one argument it must be a table name of a table in a cross join. For example The built-in function len takes a string argument and returns the lentgh of the string in bytes. The expression len(s) is constant if s is a string constant. If the argument to len is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in aggregate function max returns the largest value of an expression in a record set. Max ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if max is applied to an empty record set. The expression values must be of an ordered type. For example The built-in aggregate function min returns the smallest value of an expression in a record set. Min ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if min is applied to an empty record set. For example The column values must be of an ordered type. The built-in function minute returns the minute offset within the hour specified by t, in the range [0, 59]. If the argument to minute is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function minutes returns the duration as a floating point number of minutes. If the argument to minutes is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function month returns the month of the year specified by t (January = 1, ...). If the argument to month is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function nanosecond returns the nanosecond offset within the second specified by t, in the range [0, 999999999]. If the argument to nanosecond is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function nanoseconds returns the duration as an integer nanosecond count. If the argument to nanoseconds is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function now returns the current local time. The built-in function parseTime parses a formatted string and returns the time value it represents. The layout defines the format by showing how the reference time, would be interpreted if it were the value; it serves as an example of the input format. The same interpretation will then be made to the input string. Elements omitted from the value are assumed to be zero or, when zero is impossible, one, so parsing "3:04pm" returns the time corresponding to Jan 1, year 0, 15:04:00 UTC (note that because the year is 0, this time is before the zero Time). Years must be in the range 0000..9999. The day of the week is checked for syntax but it is otherwise ignored. In the absence of a time zone indicator, parseTime returns a time in UTC. When parsing a time with a zone offset like -0700, if the offset corresponds to a time zone used by the current location, then parseTime uses that location and zone in the returned time. Otherwise it records the time as being in a fabricated location with time fixed at the given zone offset. When parsing a time with a zone abbreviation like MST, if the zone abbreviation has a defined offset in the current location, then that offset is used. The zone abbreviation "UTC" is recognized as UTC regardless of location. If the zone abbreviation is unknown, Parse records the time as being in a fabricated location with the given zone abbreviation and a zero offset. This choice means that such a time can be parses and reformatted with the same layout losslessly, but the exact instant used in the representation will differ by the actual zone offset. To avoid such problems, prefer time layouts that use a numeric zone offset. If any argument to parseTime is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function second returns the second offset within the minute specified by t, in the range [0, 59]. If the argument to second is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function seconds returns the duration as a floating point number of seconds. If the argument to seconds is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function since returns the time elapsed since t. It is shorthand for now()-t. If the argument to since is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in aggregate function sum returns the sum of values of an expression for all rows of a record set. Sum ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if sum is applied to an empty record set. The column values must be of a numeric type. The built-in function timeIn returns t with the location information set to loc. For discussion of the loc argument please see date(). If any argument to timeIn is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function weekday returns the day of the week specified by t. Sunday == 0, Monday == 1, ... If the argument to weekday is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function year returns the year in which t occurs. If the argument to year is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function yearDay returns the day of the year specified by t, in the range [1,365] for non-leap years, and [1,366] in leap years. If the argument to yearDay is NULL the result is NULL. Three functions assemble and disassemble complex numbers. The built-in function complex constructs a complex value from a floating-point real and imaginary part, while real and imag extract the real and imaginary parts of a complex value. The type of the arguments and return value correspond. For complex, the two arguments must be of the same floating-point type and the return type is the complex type with the corresponding floating-point constituents: complex64 for float32, complex128 for float64. The real and imag functions together form the inverse, so for a complex value z, z == complex(real(z), imag(z)). If the operands of these functions are all constants, the return value is a constant. If any argument to any of complex, real, imag functions is NULL the result is NULL. For the numeric types, the following sizes are guaranteed Portions of this specification page are modifications based on work[2] created and shared by Google[3] and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License[4]. This specification is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, and code is licensed under a BSD license[5]. Links from the above documentation This section is not part of the specification. WARNING: The implementation of indices is new and it surely needs more time to become mature. Indices are used currently used only by the WHERE clause. The following expression patterns of 'WHERE expression' are recognized and trigger index use. The relOp is one of the relation operators <, <=, ==, >=, >. For the equality operator both operands must be of comparable types. For all other operators both operands must be of ordered types. The constant expression is a compile time constant expression. Some constant folding is still a TODO. Parameter is a QL parameter ($1 etc.). Consider tables t and u, both with an indexed field f. The WHERE expression doesn't comply with the above simple detected cases. However, such query is now automatically rewritten to which will use both of the indices. The impact of using the indices can be substantial (cf. BenchmarkCrossJoin*) if the resulting rows have low "selectivity", ie. only few rows from both tables are selected by the respective WHERE filtering. Note: Existing QL DBs can be used and indices can be added to them. However, once any indices are present in the DB, the old QL versions cannot work with such DB anymore. Running a benchmark with -v (-test.v) outputs information about the scale used to report records/s and a brief description of the benchmark. For example Running the full suite of benchmarks takes a lot of time. Use the -timeout flag to avoid them being killed after the default time limit (10 minutes).
Package ql implements a pure Go embedded SQL database engine. QL is a member of the SQL family of languages. It is less complex and less powerful than SQL (whichever specification SQL is considered to be). 2016-07-11: Release v1.0.5 undoes vendoring of lldb. QL now uses stable lldb (github.com/cznic/lldb). 2016-07-06: Release v1.0.4 fixes a panic when closing the WAL file. 2016-04-03: Release v1.0.3 fixes a data race. 2016-03-23: Release v1.0.2 vendors github.com/cznic/exp/lldb and github.com/camlistore/go4/lock. 2016-03-17: Release v1.0.1 adjusts for latest goyacc. Parser error messages are improved and changed, but their exact form is not considered a API change. 2016-03-05: The current version has been tagged v1.0.0. 2015-06-15: To improve compatibility with other SQL implementations, the count built-in aggregate function now accepts * as its argument. 2015-05-29: The execution planner was rewritten from scratch. It should use indices in all places where they were used before plus in some additional situations. It is possible to investigate the plan using the newly added EXPLAIN statement. The QL tool is handy for such analysis. If the planner would have used an index, but no such exists, the plan includes hints in form of copy/paste ready CREATE INDEX statements. The planner is still quite simple and a lot of work on it is yet ahead. You can help this process by filling an issue with a schema and query which fails to use an index or indices when it should, in your opinion. Bonus points for including output of `ql 'explain <query>'`. 2015-05-09: The grammar of the CREATE INDEX statement now accepts an expression list instead of a single expression, which was further limited to just a column name or the built-in id(). As a side effect, composite indices are now functional. However, the values in the expression-list style index are not yet used by other statements or the statement/query planner. The composite index is useful while having UNIQUE clause to check for semantically duplicate rows before they get added to the table or when such a row is mutated using the UPDATE statement and the expression-list style index tuple of the row is thus recomputed. 2015-05-02: The Schema field of table __Table now correctly reflects any column constraints and/or defaults. Also, the (*DB).Info method now has that information provided in new ColumInfo fields NotNull, Constraint and Default. 2015-04-20: Added support for {LEFT,RIGHT,FULL} [OUTER] JOIN. 2015-04-18: Column definitions can now have constraints and defaults. Details are discussed in the "Constraints and defaults" chapter below the CREATE TABLE statement documentation. 2015-03-06: New built-in functions formatFloat and formatInt. Thanks urandom! (https://github.com/urandom) 2015-02-16: IN predicate now accepts a SELECT statement. See the updated "Predicates" section. 2015-01-17: Logical operators || and && have now alternative spellings: OR and AND (case insensitive). AND was a keyword before, but OR is a new one. This can possibly break existing queries. For the record, it's a good idea to not use any name appearing in, for example, [7] in your queries as the list of QL's keywords may expand for gaining better compatibility with existing SQL "standards". 2015-01-12: ACID guarantees were tightened at the cost of performance in some cases. The write collecting window mechanism, a formerly used implementation detail, was removed. Inserting rows one by one in a transaction is now slow. I mean very slow. Try to avoid inserting single rows in a transaction. Instead, whenever possible, perform batch updates of tens to, say thousands of rows in a single transaction. See also: http://www.sqlite.org/faq.html#q19, the discussed synchronization principles involved are the same as for QL, modulo minor details. Note: A side effect is that closing a DB before exiting an application, both for the Go API and through database/sql driver, is no more required, strictly speaking. Beware that exiting an application while there is an open (uncommitted) transaction in progress means losing the transaction data. However, the DB will not become corrupted because of not closing it. Nor that was the case before, but formerly failing to close a DB could have resulted in losing the data of the last transaction. 2014-09-21: id() now optionally accepts a single argument - a table name. 2014-09-01: Added the DB.Flush() method and the LIKE pattern matching predicate. 2014-08-08: The built in functions max and min now accept also time values. Thanks opennota! (https://github.com/opennota) 2014-06-05: RecordSet interface extended by new methods FirstRow and Rows. 2014-06-02: Indices on id() are now used by SELECT statements. 2014-05-07: Introduction of Marshal, Schema, Unmarshal. 2014-04-15: Added optional IF NOT EXISTS clause to CREATE INDEX and optional IF EXISTS clause to DROP INDEX. 2014-04-12: The column Unique in the virtual table __Index was renamed to IsUnique because the old name is a keyword. Unfortunately, this is a breaking change, sorry. 2014-04-11: Introduction of LIMIT, OFFSET. 2014-04-10: Introduction of query rewriting. 2014-04-07: Introduction of indices. QL imports zappy[8], a block-based compressor, which speeds up its performance by using a C version of the compression/decompression algorithms. If a CGO-free (pure Go) version of QL, or an app using QL, is required, please include 'purego' in the -tags option of go {build,get,install}. For example: If zappy was installed before installing QL, it might be necessary to rebuild zappy first (or rebuild QL with all its dependencies using the -a option): The syntax is specified using Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF) Lower-case production names are used to identify lexical tokens. Non-terminals are in CamelCase. Lexical tokens are enclosed in double quotes "" or back quotes “. The form a … b represents the set of characters from a through b as alternatives. The horizontal ellipsis … is also used elsewhere in the spec to informally denote various enumerations or code snippets that are not further specified. QL source code is Unicode text encoded in UTF-8. The text is not canonicalized, so a single accented code point is distinct from the same character constructed from combining an accent and a letter; those are treated as two code points. For simplicity, this document will use the unqualified term character to refer to a Unicode code point in the source text. Each code point is distinct; for instance, upper and lower case letters are different characters. Implementation restriction: For compatibility with other tools, the parser may disallow the NUL character (U+0000) in the statement. Implementation restriction: A byte order mark is disallowed anywhere in QL statements. The following terms are used to denote specific character classes The underscore character _ (U+005F) is considered a letter. Lexical elements are comments, tokens, identifiers, keywords, operators and delimiters, integer, floating-point, imaginary, rune and string literals and QL parameters. Line comments start with the character sequence // or -- and stop at the end of the line. A line comment acts like a space. General comments start with the character sequence /* and continue through the character sequence */. A general comment acts like a space. Comments do not nest. Tokens form the vocabulary of QL. There are four classes: identifiers, keywords, operators and delimiters, and literals. White space, formed from spaces (U+0020), horizontal tabs (U+0009), carriage returns (U+000D), and newlines (U+000A), is ignored except as it separates tokens that would otherwise combine into a single token. The formal grammar uses semicolons ";" as separators of QL statements. A single QL statement or the last QL statement in a list of statements can have an optional semicolon terminator. (Actually a separator from the following empty statement.) Identifiers name entities such as tables or record set columns. An identifier is a sequence of one or more letters and digits. The first character in an identifier must be a letter. For example No identifiers are predeclared, however note that no keyword can be used as an identifier. Identifiers starting with two underscores are used for meta data virtual tables names. For forward compatibility, users should generally avoid using any identifiers starting with two underscores. For example The following keywords are reserved and may not be used as identifiers. Keywords are not case sensitive. The following character sequences represent operators, delimiters, and other special tokens Operators consisting of more than one character are referred to by names in the rest of the documentation An integer literal is a sequence of digits representing an integer constant. An optional prefix sets a non-decimal base: 0 for octal, 0x or 0X for hexadecimal. In hexadecimal literals, letters a-f and A-F represent values 10 through 15. For example A floating-point literal is a decimal representation of a floating-point constant. It has an integer part, a decimal point, a fractional part, and an exponent part. The integer and fractional part comprise decimal digits; the exponent part is an e or E followed by an optionally signed decimal exponent. One of the integer part or the fractional part may be elided; one of the decimal point or the exponent may be elided. For example An imaginary literal is a decimal representation of the imaginary part of a complex constant. It consists of a floating-point literal or decimal integer followed by the lower-case letter i. For example A rune literal represents a rune constant, an integer value identifying a Unicode code point. A rune literal is expressed as one or more characters enclosed in single quotes. Within the quotes, any character may appear except single quote and newline. A single quoted character represents the Unicode value of the character itself, while multi-character sequences beginning with a backslash encode values in various formats. The simplest form represents the single character within the quotes; since QL statements are Unicode characters encoded in UTF-8, multiple UTF-8-encoded bytes may represent a single integer value. For instance, the literal 'a' holds a single byte representing a literal a, Unicode U+0061, value 0x61, while 'ä' holds two bytes (0xc3 0xa4) representing a literal a-dieresis, U+00E4, value 0xe4. Several backslash escapes allow arbitrary values to be encoded as ASCII text. There are four ways to represent the integer value as a numeric constant: \x followed by exactly two hexadecimal digits; \u followed by exactly four hexadecimal digits; \U followed by exactly eight hexadecimal digits, and a plain backslash \ followed by exactly three octal digits. In each case the value of the literal is the value represented by the digits in the corresponding base. Although these representations all result in an integer, they have different valid ranges. Octal escapes must represent a value between 0 and 255 inclusive. Hexadecimal escapes satisfy this condition by construction. The escapes \u and \U represent Unicode code points so within them some values are illegal, in particular those above 0x10FFFF and surrogate halves. After a backslash, certain single-character escapes represent special values All other sequences starting with a backslash are illegal inside rune literals. For example A string literal represents a string constant obtained from concatenating a sequence of characters. There are two forms: raw string literals and interpreted string literals. Raw string literals are character sequences between back quotes “. Within the quotes, any character is legal except back quote. The value of a raw string literal is the string composed of the uninterpreted (implicitly UTF-8-encoded) characters between the quotes; in particular, backslashes have no special meaning and the string may contain newlines. Carriage returns inside raw string literals are discarded from the raw string value. Interpreted string literals are character sequences between double quotes "". The text between the quotes, which may not contain newlines, forms the value of the literal, with backslash escapes interpreted as they are in rune literals (except that \' is illegal and \" is legal), with the same restrictions. The three-digit octal (\nnn) and two-digit hexadecimal (\xnn) escapes represent individual bytes of the resulting string; all other escapes represent the (possibly multi-byte) UTF-8 encoding of individual characters. Thus inside a string literal \377 and \xFF represent a single byte of value 0xFF=255, while ÿ, \u00FF, \U000000FF and \xc3\xbf represent the two bytes 0xc3 0xbf of the UTF-8 encoding of character U+00FF. For example These examples all represent the same string If the statement source represents a character as two code points, such as a combining form involving an accent and a letter, the result will be an error if placed in a rune literal (it is not a single code point), and will appear as two code points if placed in a string literal. Literals are assigned their values from the respective text representation at "compile" (parse) time. QL parameters provide the same functionality as literals, but their value is assigned at execution time from an expression list passed to DB.Run or DB.Execute. Using '?' or '$' is completely equivalent. For example Keywords 'false' and 'true' (not case sensitive) represent the two possible constant values of type bool (also not case sensitive). Keyword 'NULL' (not case sensitive) represents an untyped constant which is assignable to any type. NULL is distinct from any other value of any type. A type determines the set of values and operations specific to values of that type. A type is specified by a type name. Named instances of the boolean, numeric, and string types are keywords. The names are not case sensitive. Note: The blob type is exchanged between the back end and the API as []byte. On 32 bit platforms this limits the size which the implementation can handle to 2G. A boolean type represents the set of Boolean truth values denoted by the predeclared constants true and false. The predeclared boolean type is bool. A duration type represents the elapsed time between two instants as an int64 nanosecond count. The representation limits the largest representable duration to approximately 290 years. A numeric type represents sets of integer or floating-point values. The predeclared architecture-independent numeric types are The value of an n-bit integer is n bits wide and represented using two's complement arithmetic. Conversions are required when different numeric types are mixed in an expression or assignment. A string type represents the set of string values. A string value is a (possibly empty) sequence of bytes. The case insensitive keyword for the string type is 'string'. The length of a string (its size in bytes) can be discovered using the built-in function len. A time type represents an instant in time with nanosecond precision. Each time has associated with it a location, consulted when computing the presentation form of the time. The following functions are implicitly declared An expression specifies the computation of a value by applying operators and functions to operands. Operands denote the elementary values in an expression. An operand may be a literal, a (possibly qualified) identifier denoting a constant or a function or a table/record set column, or a parenthesized expression. A qualified identifier is an identifier qualified with a table/record set name prefix. For example Primary expression are the operands for unary and binary expressions. For example A primary expression of the form denotes the element of a string indexed by x. Its type is byte. The value x is called the index. The following rules apply - The index x must be of integer type except bigint or duration; it is in range if 0 <= x < len(s), otherwise it is out of range. - A constant index must be non-negative and representable by a value of type int. - A constant index must be in range if the string a is a literal. - If x is out of range at run time, a run-time error occurs. - s[x] is the byte at index x and the type of s[x] is byte. If s is NULL or x is NULL then the result is NULL. Otherwise s[x] is illegal. For a string, the primary expression constructs a substring. The indices low and high select which elements appear in the result. The result has indices starting at 0 and length equal to high - low. For convenience, any of the indices may be omitted. A missing low index defaults to zero; a missing high index defaults to the length of the sliced operand The indices low and high are in range if 0 <= low <= high <= len(a), otherwise they are out of range. A constant index must be non-negative and representable by a value of type int. If both indices are constant, they must satisfy low <= high. If the indices are out of range at run time, a run-time error occurs. Integer values of type bigint or duration cannot be used as indices. If s is NULL the result is NULL. If low or high is not omitted and is NULL then the result is NULL. Given an identifier f denoting a predeclared function, calls f with arguments a1, a2, … an. Arguments are evaluated before the function is called. The type of the expression is the result type of f. In a function call, the function value and arguments are evaluated in the usual order. After they are evaluated, the parameters of the call are passed by value to the function and the called function begins execution. The return value of the function is passed by value when the function returns. Calling an undefined function causes a compile-time error. Operators combine operands into expressions. Comparisons are discussed elsewhere. For other binary operators, the operand types must be identical unless the operation involves shifts or untyped constants. For operations involving constants only, see the section on constant expressions. Except for shift operations, if one operand is an untyped constant and the other operand is not, the constant is converted to the type of the other operand. The right operand in a shift expression must have unsigned integer type or be an untyped constant that can be converted to unsigned integer type. If the left operand of a non-constant shift expression is an untyped constant, the type of the constant is what it would be if the shift expression were replaced by its left operand alone. Expressions of the form yield a boolean value true if expr2, a regular expression, matches expr1 (see also [6]). Both expression must be of type string. If any one of the expressions is NULL the result is NULL. Predicates are special form expressions having a boolean result type. Expressions of the form are equivalent, including NULL handling, to The types of involved expressions must be comparable as defined in "Comparison operators". Another form of the IN predicate creates the expression list from a result of a SelectStmt. The SelectStmt must select only one column. The produced expression list is resource limited by the memory available to the process. NULL values produced by the SelectStmt are ignored, but if all records of the SelectStmt are NULL the predicate yields NULL. The select statement is evaluated only once. If the type of expr is not the same as the type of the field returned by the SelectStmt then the set operation yields false. The type of the column returned by the SelectStmt must be one of the simple (non blob-like) types: Expressions of the form are equivalent, including NULL handling, to The types of involved expressions must be ordered as defined in "Comparison operators". Expressions of the form yield a boolean value true if expr does not have a specific type (case A) or if expr has a specific type (case B). In other cases the result is a boolean value false. Unary operators have the highest precedence. There are five precedence levels for binary operators. Multiplication operators bind strongest, followed by addition operators, comparison operators, && (logical AND), and finally || (logical OR) Binary operators of the same precedence associate from left to right. For instance, x / y * z is the same as (x / y) * z. Note that the operator precedence is reflected explicitly by the grammar. Arithmetic operators apply to numeric values and yield a result of the same type as the first operand. The four standard arithmetic operators (+, -, *, /) apply to integer, rational, floating-point, and complex types; + also applies to strings; +,- also applies to times. All other arithmetic operators apply to integers only. sum integers, rationals, floats, complex values, strings difference integers, rationals, floats, complex values, times product integers, rationals, floats, complex values / quotient integers, rationals, floats, complex values % remainder integers & bitwise AND integers | bitwise OR integers ^ bitwise XOR integers &^ bit clear (AND NOT) integers << left shift integer << unsigned integer >> right shift integer >> unsigned integer Strings can be concatenated using the + operator String addition creates a new string by concatenating the operands. A value of type duration can be added to or subtracted from a value of type time. Times can subtracted from each other producing a value of type duration. For two integer values x and y, the integer quotient q = x / y and remainder r = x % y satisfy the following relationships with x / y truncated towards zero ("truncated division"). As an exception to this rule, if the dividend x is the most negative value for the int type of x, the quotient q = x / -1 is equal to x (and r = 0). If the divisor is a constant expression, it must not be zero. If the divisor is zero at run time, a run-time error occurs. If the dividend is non-negative and the divisor is a constant power of 2, the division may be replaced by a right shift, and computing the remainder may be replaced by a bitwise AND operation The shift operators shift the left operand by the shift count specified by the right operand. They implement arithmetic shifts if the left operand is a signed integer and logical shifts if it is an unsigned integer. There is no upper limit on the shift count. Shifts behave as if the left operand is shifted n times by 1 for a shift count of n. As a result, x << 1 is the same as x*2 and x >> 1 is the same as x/2 but truncated towards negative infinity. For integer operands, the unary operators +, -, and ^ are defined as follows For floating-point and complex numbers, +x is the same as x, while -x is the negation of x. The result of a floating-point or complex division by zero is not specified beyond the IEEE-754 standard; whether a run-time error occurs is implementation-specific. Whenever any operand of any arithmetic operation, unary or binary, is NULL, as well as in the case of the string concatenating operation, the result is NULL. For unsigned integer values, the operations +, -, *, and << are computed modulo 2n, where n is the bit width of the unsigned integer's type. Loosely speaking, these unsigned integer operations discard high bits upon overflow, and expressions may rely on “wrap around”. For signed integers with a finite bit width, the operations +, -, *, and << may legally overflow and the resulting value exists and is deterministically defined by the signed integer representation, the operation, and its operands. No exception is raised as a result of overflow. An evaluator may not optimize an expression under the assumption that overflow does not occur. For instance, it may not assume that x < x + 1 is always true. Integers of type bigint and rationals do not overflow but their handling is limited by the memory resources available to the program. Comparison operators compare two operands and yield a boolean value. In any comparison, the first operand must be of same type as is the second operand, or vice versa. The equality operators == and != apply to operands that are comparable. The ordering operators <, <=, >, and >= apply to operands that are ordered. These terms and the result of the comparisons are defined as follows - Boolean values are comparable. Two boolean values are equal if they are either both true or both false. - Complex values are comparable. Two complex values u and v are equal if both real(u) == real(v) and imag(u) == imag(v). - Integer values are comparable and ordered, in the usual way. Note that durations are integers. - Floating point values are comparable and ordered, as defined by the IEEE-754 standard. - Rational values are comparable and ordered, in the usual way. - String values are comparable and ordered, lexically byte-wise. - Time values are comparable and ordered. Whenever any operand of any comparison operation is NULL, the result is NULL. Note that slices are always of type string. Logical operators apply to boolean values and yield a boolean result. The right operand is evaluated conditionally. The truth tables for logical operations with NULL values Conversions are expressions of the form T(x) where T is a type and x is an expression that can be converted to type T. A constant value x can be converted to type T in any of these cases: - x is representable by a value of type T. - x is a floating-point constant, T is a floating-point type, and x is representable by a value of type T after rounding using IEEE 754 round-to-even rules. The constant T(x) is the rounded value. - x is an integer constant and T is a string type. The same rule as for non-constant x applies in this case. Converting a constant yields a typed constant as result. A non-constant value x can be converted to type T in any of these cases: - x has type T. - x's type and T are both integer or floating point types. - x's type and T are both complex types. - x is an integer, except bigint or duration, and T is a string type. Specific rules apply to (non-constant) conversions between numeric types or to and from a string type. These conversions may change the representation of x and incur a run-time cost. All other conversions only change the type but not the representation of x. A conversion of NULL to any type yields NULL. For the conversion of non-constant numeric values, the following rules apply 1. When converting between integer types, if the value is a signed integer, it is sign extended to implicit infinite precision; otherwise it is zero extended. It is then truncated to fit in the result type's size. For example, if v == uint16(0x10F0), then uint32(int8(v)) == 0xFFFFFFF0. The conversion always yields a valid value; there is no indication of overflow. 2. When converting a floating-point number to an integer, the fraction is discarded (truncation towards zero). 3. When converting an integer or floating-point number to a floating-point type, or a complex number to another complex type, the result value is rounded to the precision specified by the destination type. For instance, the value of a variable x of type float32 may be stored using additional precision beyond that of an IEEE-754 32-bit number, but float32(x) represents the result of rounding x's value to 32-bit precision. Similarly, x + 0.1 may use more than 32 bits of precision, but float32(x + 0.1) does not. In all non-constant conversions involving floating-point or complex values, if the result type cannot represent the value the conversion succeeds but the result value is implementation-dependent. 1. Converting a signed or unsigned integer value to a string type yields a string containing the UTF-8 representation of the integer. Values outside the range of valid Unicode code points are converted to "\uFFFD". 2. Converting a blob to a string type yields a string whose successive bytes are the elements of the blob. 3. Converting a value of a string type to a blob yields a blob whose successive elements are the bytes of the string. 4. Converting a value of a bigint type to a string yields a string containing the decimal decimal representation of the integer. 5. Converting a value of a string type to a bigint yields a bigint value containing the integer represented by the string value. A prefix of “0x” or “0X” selects base 16; the “0” prefix selects base 8, and a “0b” or “0B” prefix selects base 2. Otherwise the value is interpreted in base 10. An error occurs if the string value is not in any valid format. 6. Converting a value of a rational type to a string yields a string containing the decimal decimal representation of the rational in the form "a/b" (even if b == 1). 7. Converting a value of a string type to a bigrat yields a bigrat value containing the rational represented by the string value. The string can be given as a fraction "a/b" or as a floating-point number optionally followed by an exponent. An error occurs if the string value is not in any valid format. 8. Converting a value of a duration type to a string returns a string representing the duration in the form "72h3m0.5s". Leading zero units are omitted. As a special case, durations less than one second format using a smaller unit (milli-, micro-, or nanoseconds) to ensure that the leading digit is non-zero. The zero duration formats as 0, with no unit. 9. Converting a string value to a duration yields a duration represented by the string. A duration string is a possibly signed sequence of decimal numbers, each with optional fraction and a unit suffix, such as "300ms", "-1.5h" or "2h45m". Valid time units are "ns", "us" (or "µs"), "ms", "s", "m", "h". 10. Converting a time value to a string returns the time formatted using the format string When evaluating the operands of an expression or of function calls, operations are evaluated in lexical left-to-right order. For example, in the evaluation of the function calls and evaluation of c happen in the order h(), i(), j(), c. Floating-point operations within a single expression are evaluated according to the associativity of the operators. Explicit parentheses affect the evaluation by overriding the default associativity. In the expression x + (y + z) the addition y + z is performed before adding x. Statements control execution. The empty statement does nothing. Alter table statements modify existing tables. With the ADD clause it adds a new column to the table. The column must not exist. With the DROP clause it removes an existing column from a table. The column must exist and it must be not the only (last) column of the table. IOW, there cannot be a table with no columns. For example When adding a column to a table with existing data, the constraint clause of the ColumnDef cannot be used. Adding a constrained column to an empty table is fine. Begin transactions statements introduce a new transaction level. Every transaction level must be eventually balanced by exactly one of COMMIT or ROLLBACK statements. Note that when a transaction is roll-backed because of a statement failure then no explicit balancing of the respective BEGIN TRANSACTION is statement is required nor permitted. Failure to properly balance any opened transaction level may cause dead locks and/or lose of data updated in the uppermost opened but never properly closed transaction level. For example A database cannot be updated (mutated) outside of a transaction. Statements requiring a transaction A database is effectively read only outside of a transaction. Statements not requiring a transaction The commit statement closes the innermost transaction nesting level. If that's the outermost level then the updates to the DB made by the transaction are atomically made persistent. For example Create index statements create new indices. Index is a named projection of ordered values of a table column to the respective records. As a special case the id() of the record can be indexed. Index name must not be the same as any of the existing tables and it also cannot be the same as of any column name of the table the index is on. For example Now certain SELECT statements may use the indices to speed up joins and/or to speed up record set filtering when the WHERE clause is used; or the indices might be used to improve the performance when the ORDER BY clause is present. The UNIQUE modifier requires the indexed values tuple to be index-wise unique or have all values NULL. The optional IF NOT EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the index already exists. A simple index consists of only one expression which must be either a column name or the built-in id(). A more complex and more general index is one that consists of more than one expression or its single expression does not qualify as a simple index. In this case the type of all expressions in the list must be one of the non blob-like types. Note: Blob-like types are blob, bigint, bigrat, time and duration. Create table statements create new tables. A column definition declares the column name and type. Table names and column names are case sensitive. Neither a table or an index of the same name may exist in the DB. For example The optional IF NOT EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the table already exists. The optional constraint clause has two forms. The first one is found in many SQL dialects. This form prevents the data in column DepartmentName to be NULL. The second form allows an arbitrary boolean expression to be used to validate the column. If the value of the expression is true then the validation succeeded. If the value of the expression is false or NULL then the validation fails. If the value of the expression is not of type bool an error occurs. The optional DEFAULT clause is an expression which, if present, is substituted instead of a NULL value when the colum is assigned a value. Note that the constraint and/or default expressions may refer to other columns by name: When a table row is inserted by the INSERT INTO statement or when a table row is updated by the UPDATE statement, the order of operations is as follows: 1. The new values of the affected columns are set and the values of all the row columns become the named values which can be referred to in default expressions evaluated in step 2. 2. If any row column value is NULL and the DEFAULT clause is present in the column's definition, the default expression is evaluated and its value is set as the respective column value. 3. The values, potentially updated, of row columns become the named values which can be referred to in constraint expressions evaluated during step 4. 4. All row columns which definition has the constraint clause present will have that constraint checked. If any constraint violation is detected, the overall operation fails and no changes to the table are made. Delete from statements remove rows from a table, which must exist. For example If the WHERE clause is not present then all rows are removed and the statement is equivalent to the TRUNCATE TABLE statement. Drop index statements remove indices from the DB. The index must exist. For example The optional IF EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the index does not exist. Drop table statements remove tables from the DB. The table must exist. For example The optional IF EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the table does not exist. Insert into statements insert new rows into tables. New rows come from literal data, if using the VALUES clause, or are a result of select statement. In the later case the select statement is fully evaluated before the insertion of any rows is performed, allowing to insert values calculated from the same table rows are to be inserted into. If the ColumnNameList part is omitted then the number of values inserted in the row must be the same as are columns in the table. If the ColumnNameList part is present then the number of values per row must be same as the same number of column names. All other columns of the record are set to NULL. The type of the value assigned to a column must be the same as is the column's type or the value must be NULL. For example If any of the columns of the table were defined using the optional constraints clause or the optional defaults clause then those are processed on a per row basis. The details are discussed in the "Constraints and defaults" chapter below the CREATE TABLE statement documentation. Explain statement produces a recordset consisting of lines of text which describe the execution plan of a statement, if any. For example, the QL tool treats the explain statement specially and outputs the joined lines: The explanation may aid in uderstanding how a statement/query would be executed and if indices are used as expected - or which indices may possibly improve the statement performance. The create index statements above were directly copy/pasted in the terminal from the suggestions provided by the filter recordset pipeline part returned by the explain statement. If the statement has nothing special in its plan, the result is the original statement. To get an explanation of the select statement of the IN predicate, use the EXPLAIN statement with that particular select statement. The rollback statement closes the innermost transaction nesting level discarding any updates to the DB made by it. If that's the outermost level then the effects on the DB are as if the transaction never happened. For example The (temporary) record set from the last statement is returned and can be processed by the client. In this case the rollback is the same as 'DROP TABLE tmp;' but it can be a more complex operation. Select from statements produce recordsets. The optional DISTINCT modifier ensures all rows in the result recordset are unique. Either all of the resulting fields are returned ('*') or only those named in FieldList. RecordSetList is a list of table names or parenthesized select statements, optionally (re)named using the AS clause. The result can be filtered using a WhereClause and orderd by the OrderBy clause. For example If Recordset is a nested, parenthesized SelectStmt then it must be given a name using the AS clause if its field are to be accessible in expressions. A field is an named expression. Identifiers, not used as a type in conversion or a function name in the Call clause, denote names of (other) fields, values of which should be used in the expression. The expression can be named using the AS clause. If the AS clause is not present and the expression consists solely of a field name, then that field name is used as the name of the resulting field. Otherwise the field is unnamed. For example The SELECT statement can optionally enumerate the desired/resulting fields in a list. No two identical field names can appear in the list. When more than one record set is used in the FROM clause record set list, the result record set field names are rewritten to be qualified using the record set names. If a particular record set doesn't have a name, its respective fields became unnamed. The optional JOIN clause, for example is mostly equal to except that the rows from a which, when they appear in the cross join, never made expr to evaluate to true, are combined with a virtual row from b, containing all nulls, and added to the result set. For the RIGHT JOIN variant the discussed rules are used for rows from b not satisfying expr == true and the virtual, all-null row "comes" from a. The FULL JOIN adds the respective rows which would be otherwise provided by the separate executions of the LEFT JOIN and RIGHT JOIN variants. For more thorough OUTER JOIN discussion please see the Wikipedia article at [10]. Resultins rows of a SELECT statement can be optionally ordered by the ORDER BY clause. Collating proceeds by considering the expressions in the expression list left to right until a collating order is determined. Any possibly remaining expressions are not evaluated. All of the expression values must yield an ordered type or NULL. Ordered types are defined in "Comparison operators". Collating of elements having a NULL value is different compared to what the comparison operators yield in expression evaluation (NULL result instead of a boolean value). Below, T denotes a non NULL value of any QL type. NULL collates before any non NULL value (is considered smaller than T). Two NULLs have no collating order (are considered equal). The WHERE clause restricts records considered by some statements, like SELECT FROM, DELETE FROM, or UPDATE. It is an error if the expression evaluates to a non null value of non bool type. The GROUP BY clause is used to project rows having common values into a smaller set of rows. For example Using the GROUP BY without any aggregate functions in the selected fields is in certain cases equal to using the DISTINCT modifier. The last two examples above produce the same resultsets. The optional OFFSET clause allows to ignore first N records. For example The above will produce only rows 11, 12, ... of the record set, if they exist. The value of the expression must a non negative integer, but not bigint or duration. The optional LIMIT clause allows to ignore all but first N records. For example The above will return at most the first 10 records of the record set. The value of the expression must a non negative integer, but not bigint or duration. The LIMIT and OFFSET clauses can be combined. For example Considering table t has, say 10 records, the above will produce only records 4 - 8. After returning record #8, no more result rows/records are computed. 1. The FROM clause is evaluated, producing a Cartesian product of its source record sets (tables or nested SELECT statements). 2. If present, the JOIN cluase is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation and the recordset specified by the JOIN clause. (... JOIN Recordset ON ...) 3. If present, the WHERE clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation. 4. If present, the GROUP BY clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 5. The SELECT field expressions are evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 6. If present, the DISTINCT modifier is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 7. If present, the ORDER BY clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 8. If present, the OFFSET clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). The offset expression is evaluated once for the first record produced by the previous evaluations. 9. If present, the LIMIT clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). The limit expression is evaluated once for the first record produced by the previous evaluations. Truncate table statements remove all records from a table. The table must exist. For example Update statements change values of fields in rows of a table. For example Note: The SET clause is optional. If any of the columns of the table were defined using the optional constraints clause or the optional defaults clause then those are processed on a per row basis. The details are discussed in the "Constraints and defaults" chapter below the CREATE TABLE statement documentation. To allow to query for DB meta data, there exist specially named tables, some of them being virtual. Note: Virtual system tables may have fake table-wise unique but meaningless and unstable record IDs. Do not apply the built-in id() to any system table. The table __Table lists all tables in the DB. The schema is The Schema column returns the statement to (re)create table Name. This table is virtual. The table __Colum lists all columns of all tables in the DB. The schema is The Ordinal column defines the 1-based index of the column in the record. This table is virtual. The table __Colum2 lists all columns of all tables in the DB which have the constraint NOT NULL or which have a constraint expression defined or which have a default expression defined. The schema is It's possible to obtain a consolidated recordset for all properties of all DB columns using The Name column is the column name in TableName. The table __Index lists all indices in the DB. The schema is The IsUnique columns reflects if the index was created using the optional UNIQUE clause. This table is virtual. Built-in functions are predeclared. The built-in aggregate function avg returns the average of values of an expression. Avg ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if avg is applied to an empty record set. The column values must be of a numeric type. The built-in function contains returns true if substr is within s. If any argument to contains is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in aggregate function count returns how many times an expression has a non NULL values or the number of rows in a record set. Note: count() returns 0 for an empty record set. For example Date returns the time corresponding to in the appropriate zone for that time in the given location. The month, day, hour, min, sec, and nsec values may be outside their usual ranges and will be normalized during the conversion. For example, October 32 converts to November 1. A daylight savings time transition skips or repeats times. For example, in the United States, March 13, 2011 2:15am never occurred, while November 6, 2011 1:15am occurred twice. In such cases, the choice of time zone, and therefore the time, is not well-defined. Date returns a time that is correct in one of the two zones involved in the transition, but it does not guarantee which. A location maps time instants to the zone in use at that time. Typically, the location represents the collection of time offsets in use in a geographical area, such as "CEST" and "CET" for central Europe. "local" represents the system's local time zone. "UTC" represents Universal Coordinated Time (UTC). The month specifies a month of the year (January = 1, ...). If any argument to date is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function day returns the day of the month specified by t. If the argument to day is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function formatTime returns a textual representation of the time value formatted according to layout, which defines the format by showing how the reference time, would be displayed if it were the value; it serves as an example of the desired output. The same display rules will then be applied to the time value. If any argument to formatTime is NULL the result is NULL. NOTE: The string value of the time zone, like "CET" or "ACDT", is dependent on the time zone of the machine the function is run on. For example, if the t value is in "CET", but the machine is in "ACDT", instead of "CET" the result is "+0100". This is the same what Go (time.Time).String() returns and in fact formatTime directly calls t.String(). returns on a machine in the CET time zone, but may return on a machine in the ACDT zone. The time value is in both cases the same so its ordering and comparing is correct. Only the display value can differ. The built-in functions formatFloat and formatInt format numbers to strings using go's number format functions in the `strconv` package. For all three functions, only the first argument is mandatory. The default values of the rest are shown in the examples. If the first argument is NULL, the result is NULL. returns returns returns Unlike the `strconv` equivalent, the formatInt function handles all integer types, both signed and unsigned. The built-in function hasPrefix tests whether the string s begins with prefix. If any argument to hasPrefix is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function hasSuffix tests whether the string s ends with suffix. If any argument to hasSuffix is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function hour returns the hour within the day specified by t, in the range [0, 23]. If the argument to hour is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function hours returns the duration as a floating point number of hours. If the argument to hours is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function id takes zero or one arguments. If no argument is provided, id() returns a table-unique automatically assigned numeric identifier of type int. Ids of deleted records are not reused unless the DB becomes completely empty (has no tables). For example If id() without arguments is called for a row which is not a table record then the result value is NULL. For example If id() has one argument it must be a table name of a table in a cross join. For example The built-in function len takes a string argument and returns the lentgh of the string in bytes. The expression len(s) is constant if s is a string constant. If the argument to len is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in aggregate function max returns the largest value of an expression in a record set. Max ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if max is applied to an empty record set. The expression values must be of an ordered type. For example The built-in aggregate function min returns the smallest value of an expression in a record set. Min ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if min is applied to an empty record set. For example The column values must be of an ordered type. The built-in function minute returns the minute offset within the hour specified by t, in the range [0, 59]. If the argument to minute is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function minutes returns the duration as a floating point number of minutes. If the argument to minutes is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function month returns the month of the year specified by t (January = 1, ...). If the argument to month is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function nanosecond returns the nanosecond offset within the second specified by t, in the range [0, 999999999]. If the argument to nanosecond is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function nanoseconds returns the duration as an integer nanosecond count. If the argument to nanoseconds is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function now returns the current local time. The built-in function parseTime parses a formatted string and returns the time value it represents. The layout defines the format by showing how the reference time, would be interpreted if it were the value; it serves as an example of the input format. The same interpretation will then be made to the input string. Elements omitted from the value are assumed to be zero or, when zero is impossible, one, so parsing "3:04pm" returns the time corresponding to Jan 1, year 0, 15:04:00 UTC (note that because the year is 0, this time is before the zero Time). Years must be in the range 0000..9999. The day of the week is checked for syntax but it is otherwise ignored. In the absence of a time zone indicator, parseTime returns a time in UTC. When parsing a time with a zone offset like -0700, if the offset corresponds to a time zone used by the current location, then parseTime uses that location and zone in the returned time. Otherwise it records the time as being in a fabricated location with time fixed at the given zone offset. When parsing a time with a zone abbreviation like MST, if the zone abbreviation has a defined offset in the current location, then that offset is used. The zone abbreviation "UTC" is recognized as UTC regardless of location. If the zone abbreviation is unknown, Parse records the time as being in a fabricated location with the given zone abbreviation and a zero offset. This choice means that such a time can be parses and reformatted with the same layout losslessly, but the exact instant used in the representation will differ by the actual zone offset. To avoid such problems, prefer time layouts that use a numeric zone offset. If any argument to parseTime is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function second returns the second offset within the minute specified by t, in the range [0, 59]. If the argument to second is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function seconds returns the duration as a floating point number of seconds. If the argument to seconds is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function since returns the time elapsed since t. It is shorthand for now()-t. If the argument to since is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in aggregate function sum returns the sum of values of an expression for all rows of a record set. Sum ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if sum is applied to an empty record set. The column values must be of a numeric type. The built-in function timeIn returns t with the location information set to loc. For discussion of the loc argument please see date(). If any argument to timeIn is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function weekday returns the day of the week specified by t. Sunday == 0, Monday == 1, ... If the argument to weekday is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function year returns the year in which t occurs. If the argument to year is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function yearDay returns the day of the year specified by t, in the range [1,365] for non-leap years, and [1,366] in leap years. If the argument to yearDay is NULL the result is NULL. Three functions assemble and disassemble complex numbers. The built-in function complex constructs a complex value from a floating-point real and imaginary part, while real and imag extract the real and imaginary parts of a complex value. The type of the arguments and return value correspond. For complex, the two arguments must be of the same floating-point type and the return type is the complex type with the corresponding floating-point constituents: complex64 for float32, complex128 for float64. The real and imag functions together form the inverse, so for a complex value z, z == complex(real(z), imag(z)). If the operands of these functions are all constants, the return value is a constant. If any argument to any of complex, real, imag functions is NULL the result is NULL. For the numeric types, the following sizes are guaranteed Portions of this specification page are modifications based on work[2] created and shared by Google[3] and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License[4]. This specification is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, and code is licensed under a BSD license[5]. Links from the above documentation This section is not part of the specification. WARNING: The implementation of indices is new and it surely needs more time to become mature. Indices are used currently used only by the WHERE clause. The following expression patterns of 'WHERE expression' are recognized and trigger index use. The relOp is one of the relation operators <, <=, ==, >=, >. For the equality operator both operands must be of comparable types. For all other operators both operands must be of ordered types. The constant expression is a compile time constant expression. Some constant folding is still a TODO. Parameter is a QL parameter ($1 etc.). Consider tables t and u, both with an indexed field f. The WHERE expression doesn't comply with the above simple detected cases. However, such query is now automatically rewritten to which will use both of the indices. The impact of using the indices can be substantial (cf. BenchmarkCrossJoin*) if the resulting rows have low "selectivity", ie. only few rows from both tables are selected by the respective WHERE filtering. Note: Existing QL DBs can be used and indices can be added to them. However, once any indices are present in the DB, the old QL versions cannot work with such DB anymore. Running a benchmark with -v (-test.v) outputs information about the scale used to report records/s and a brief description of the benchmark. For example Running the full suite of benchmarks takes a lot of time. Use the -timeout flag to avoid them being killed after the default time limit (10 minutes).
Package ql implements a pure Go embedded SQL database engine. QL is a member of the SQL family of languages. It is less complex and less powerful than SQL (whichever specification SQL is considered to be). 2016-07-29: Release v1.0.6 enables alternatively using = instead of == for equality oparation. 2016-07-11: Release v1.0.5 undoes vendoring of lldb. QL now uses stable lldb (github.com/cznic/lldb). 2016-07-06: Release v1.0.4 fixes a panic when closing the WAL file. 2016-04-03: Release v1.0.3 fixes a data race. 2016-03-23: Release v1.0.2 vendors github.com/cznic/exp/lldb and github.com/camlistore/go4/lock. 2016-03-17: Release v1.0.1 adjusts for latest goyacc. Parser error messages are improved and changed, but their exact form is not considered a API change. 2016-03-05: The current version has been tagged v1.0.0. 2015-06-15: To improve compatibility with other SQL implementations, the count built-in aggregate function now accepts * as its argument. 2015-05-29: The execution planner was rewritten from scratch. It should use indices in all places where they were used before plus in some additional situations. It is possible to investigate the plan using the newly added EXPLAIN statement. The QL tool is handy for such analysis. If the planner would have used an index, but no such exists, the plan includes hints in form of copy/paste ready CREATE INDEX statements. The planner is still quite simple and a lot of work on it is yet ahead. You can help this process by filling an issue with a schema and query which fails to use an index or indices when it should, in your opinion. Bonus points for including output of `ql 'explain <query>'`. 2015-05-09: The grammar of the CREATE INDEX statement now accepts an expression list instead of a single expression, which was further limited to just a column name or the built-in id(). As a side effect, composite indices are now functional. However, the values in the expression-list style index are not yet used by other statements or the statement/query planner. The composite index is useful while having UNIQUE clause to check for semantically duplicate rows before they get added to the table or when such a row is mutated using the UPDATE statement and the expression-list style index tuple of the row is thus recomputed. 2015-05-02: The Schema field of table __Table now correctly reflects any column constraints and/or defaults. Also, the (*DB).Info method now has that information provided in new ColumInfo fields NotNull, Constraint and Default. 2015-04-20: Added support for {LEFT,RIGHT,FULL} [OUTER] JOIN. 2015-04-18: Column definitions can now have constraints and defaults. Details are discussed in the "Constraints and defaults" chapter below the CREATE TABLE statement documentation. 2015-03-06: New built-in functions formatFloat and formatInt. Thanks urandom! (https://github.com/urandom) 2015-02-16: IN predicate now accepts a SELECT statement. See the updated "Predicates" section. 2015-01-17: Logical operators || and && have now alternative spellings: OR and AND (case insensitive). AND was a keyword before, but OR is a new one. This can possibly break existing queries. For the record, it's a good idea to not use any name appearing in, for example, [7] in your queries as the list of QL's keywords may expand for gaining better compatibility with existing SQL "standards". 2015-01-12: ACID guarantees were tightened at the cost of performance in some cases. The write collecting window mechanism, a formerly used implementation detail, was removed. Inserting rows one by one in a transaction is now slow. I mean very slow. Try to avoid inserting single rows in a transaction. Instead, whenever possible, perform batch updates of tens to, say thousands of rows in a single transaction. See also: http://www.sqlite.org/faq.html#q19, the discussed synchronization principles involved are the same as for QL, modulo minor details. Note: A side effect is that closing a DB before exiting an application, both for the Go API and through database/sql driver, is no more required, strictly speaking. Beware that exiting an application while there is an open (uncommitted) transaction in progress means losing the transaction data. However, the DB will not become corrupted because of not closing it. Nor that was the case before, but formerly failing to close a DB could have resulted in losing the data of the last transaction. 2014-09-21: id() now optionally accepts a single argument - a table name. 2014-09-01: Added the DB.Flush() method and the LIKE pattern matching predicate. 2014-08-08: The built in functions max and min now accept also time values. Thanks opennota! (https://github.com/opennota) 2014-06-05: RecordSet interface extended by new methods FirstRow and Rows. 2014-06-02: Indices on id() are now used by SELECT statements. 2014-05-07: Introduction of Marshal, Schema, Unmarshal. 2014-04-15: Added optional IF NOT EXISTS clause to CREATE INDEX and optional IF EXISTS clause to DROP INDEX. 2014-04-12: The column Unique in the virtual table __Index was renamed to IsUnique because the old name is a keyword. Unfortunately, this is a breaking change, sorry. 2014-04-11: Introduction of LIMIT, OFFSET. 2014-04-10: Introduction of query rewriting. 2014-04-07: Introduction of indices. QL imports zappy[8], a block-based compressor, which speeds up its performance by using a C version of the compression/decompression algorithms. If a CGO-free (pure Go) version of QL, or an app using QL, is required, please include 'purego' in the -tags option of go {build,get,install}. For example: If zappy was installed before installing QL, it might be necessary to rebuild zappy first (or rebuild QL with all its dependencies using the -a option): The syntax is specified using Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF) Lower-case production names are used to identify lexical tokens. Non-terminals are in CamelCase. Lexical tokens are enclosed in double quotes "" or back quotes “. The form a … b represents the set of characters from a through b as alternatives. The horizontal ellipsis … is also used elsewhere in the spec to informally denote various enumerations or code snippets that are not further specified. QL source code is Unicode text encoded in UTF-8. The text is not canonicalized, so a single accented code point is distinct from the same character constructed from combining an accent and a letter; those are treated as two code points. For simplicity, this document will use the unqualified term character to refer to a Unicode code point in the source text. Each code point is distinct; for instance, upper and lower case letters are different characters. Implementation restriction: For compatibility with other tools, the parser may disallow the NUL character (U+0000) in the statement. Implementation restriction: A byte order mark is disallowed anywhere in QL statements. The following terms are used to denote specific character classes The underscore character _ (U+005F) is considered a letter. Lexical elements are comments, tokens, identifiers, keywords, operators and delimiters, integer, floating-point, imaginary, rune and string literals and QL parameters. Line comments start with the character sequence // or -- and stop at the end of the line. A line comment acts like a space. General comments start with the character sequence /* and continue through the character sequence */. A general comment acts like a space. Comments do not nest. Tokens form the vocabulary of QL. There are four classes: identifiers, keywords, operators and delimiters, and literals. White space, formed from spaces (U+0020), horizontal tabs (U+0009), carriage returns (U+000D), and newlines (U+000A), is ignored except as it separates tokens that would otherwise combine into a single token. The formal grammar uses semicolons ";" as separators of QL statements. A single QL statement or the last QL statement in a list of statements can have an optional semicolon terminator. (Actually a separator from the following empty statement.) Identifiers name entities such as tables or record set columns. An identifier is a sequence of one or more letters and digits. The first character in an identifier must be a letter. For example No identifiers are predeclared, however note that no keyword can be used as an identifier. Identifiers starting with two underscores are used for meta data virtual tables names. For forward compatibility, users should generally avoid using any identifiers starting with two underscores. For example The following keywords are reserved and may not be used as identifiers. Keywords are not case sensitive. The following character sequences represent operators, delimiters, and other special tokens Operators consisting of more than one character are referred to by names in the rest of the documentation An integer literal is a sequence of digits representing an integer constant. An optional prefix sets a non-decimal base: 0 for octal, 0x or 0X for hexadecimal. In hexadecimal literals, letters a-f and A-F represent values 10 through 15. For example A floating-point literal is a decimal representation of a floating-point constant. It has an integer part, a decimal point, a fractional part, and an exponent part. The integer and fractional part comprise decimal digits; the exponent part is an e or E followed by an optionally signed decimal exponent. One of the integer part or the fractional part may be elided; one of the decimal point or the exponent may be elided. For example An imaginary literal is a decimal representation of the imaginary part of a complex constant. It consists of a floating-point literal or decimal integer followed by the lower-case letter i. For example A rune literal represents a rune constant, an integer value identifying a Unicode code point. A rune literal is expressed as one or more characters enclosed in single quotes. Within the quotes, any character may appear except single quote and newline. A single quoted character represents the Unicode value of the character itself, while multi-character sequences beginning with a backslash encode values in various formats. The simplest form represents the single character within the quotes; since QL statements are Unicode characters encoded in UTF-8, multiple UTF-8-encoded bytes may represent a single integer value. For instance, the literal 'a' holds a single byte representing a literal a, Unicode U+0061, value 0x61, while 'ä' holds two bytes (0xc3 0xa4) representing a literal a-dieresis, U+00E4, value 0xe4. Several backslash escapes allow arbitrary values to be encoded as ASCII text. There are four ways to represent the integer value as a numeric constant: \x followed by exactly two hexadecimal digits; \u followed by exactly four hexadecimal digits; \U followed by exactly eight hexadecimal digits, and a plain backslash \ followed by exactly three octal digits. In each case the value of the literal is the value represented by the digits in the corresponding base. Although these representations all result in an integer, they have different valid ranges. Octal escapes must represent a value between 0 and 255 inclusive. Hexadecimal escapes satisfy this condition by construction. The escapes \u and \U represent Unicode code points so within them some values are illegal, in particular those above 0x10FFFF and surrogate halves. After a backslash, certain single-character escapes represent special values All other sequences starting with a backslash are illegal inside rune literals. For example A string literal represents a string constant obtained from concatenating a sequence of characters. There are two forms: raw string literals and interpreted string literals. Raw string literals are character sequences between back quotes “. Within the quotes, any character is legal except back quote. The value of a raw string literal is the string composed of the uninterpreted (implicitly UTF-8-encoded) characters between the quotes; in particular, backslashes have no special meaning and the string may contain newlines. Carriage returns inside raw string literals are discarded from the raw string value. Interpreted string literals are character sequences between double quotes "". The text between the quotes, which may not contain newlines, forms the value of the literal, with backslash escapes interpreted as they are in rune literals (except that \' is illegal and \" is legal), with the same restrictions. The three-digit octal (\nnn) and two-digit hexadecimal (\xnn) escapes represent individual bytes of the resulting string; all other escapes represent the (possibly multi-byte) UTF-8 encoding of individual characters. Thus inside a string literal \377 and \xFF represent a single byte of value 0xFF=255, while ÿ, \u00FF, \U000000FF and \xc3\xbf represent the two bytes 0xc3 0xbf of the UTF-8 encoding of character U+00FF. For example These examples all represent the same string If the statement source represents a character as two code points, such as a combining form involving an accent and a letter, the result will be an error if placed in a rune literal (it is not a single code point), and will appear as two code points if placed in a string literal. Literals are assigned their values from the respective text representation at "compile" (parse) time. QL parameters provide the same functionality as literals, but their value is assigned at execution time from an expression list passed to DB.Run or DB.Execute. Using '?' or '$' is completely equivalent. For example Keywords 'false' and 'true' (not case sensitive) represent the two possible constant values of type bool (also not case sensitive). Keyword 'NULL' (not case sensitive) represents an untyped constant which is assignable to any type. NULL is distinct from any other value of any type. A type determines the set of values and operations specific to values of that type. A type is specified by a type name. Named instances of the boolean, numeric, and string types are keywords. The names are not case sensitive. Note: The blob type is exchanged between the back end and the API as []byte. On 32 bit platforms this limits the size which the implementation can handle to 2G. A boolean type represents the set of Boolean truth values denoted by the predeclared constants true and false. The predeclared boolean type is bool. A duration type represents the elapsed time between two instants as an int64 nanosecond count. The representation limits the largest representable duration to approximately 290 years. A numeric type represents sets of integer or floating-point values. The predeclared architecture-independent numeric types are The value of an n-bit integer is n bits wide and represented using two's complement arithmetic. Conversions are required when different numeric types are mixed in an expression or assignment. A string type represents the set of string values. A string value is a (possibly empty) sequence of bytes. The case insensitive keyword for the string type is 'string'. The length of a string (its size in bytes) can be discovered using the built-in function len. A time type represents an instant in time with nanosecond precision. Each time has associated with it a location, consulted when computing the presentation form of the time. The following functions are implicitly declared An expression specifies the computation of a value by applying operators and functions to operands. Operands denote the elementary values in an expression. An operand may be a literal, a (possibly qualified) identifier denoting a constant or a function or a table/record set column, or a parenthesized expression. A qualified identifier is an identifier qualified with a table/record set name prefix. For example Primary expression are the operands for unary and binary expressions. For example A primary expression of the form denotes the element of a string indexed by x. Its type is byte. The value x is called the index. The following rules apply - The index x must be of integer type except bigint or duration; it is in range if 0 <= x < len(s), otherwise it is out of range. - A constant index must be non-negative and representable by a value of type int. - A constant index must be in range if the string a is a literal. - If x is out of range at run time, a run-time error occurs. - s[x] is the byte at index x and the type of s[x] is byte. If s is NULL or x is NULL then the result is NULL. Otherwise s[x] is illegal. For a string, the primary expression constructs a substring. The indices low and high select which elements appear in the result. The result has indices starting at 0 and length equal to high - low. For convenience, any of the indices may be omitted. A missing low index defaults to zero; a missing high index defaults to the length of the sliced operand The indices low and high are in range if 0 <= low <= high <= len(a), otherwise they are out of range. A constant index must be non-negative and representable by a value of type int. If both indices are constant, they must satisfy low <= high. If the indices are out of range at run time, a run-time error occurs. Integer values of type bigint or duration cannot be used as indices. If s is NULL the result is NULL. If low or high is not omitted and is NULL then the result is NULL. Given an identifier f denoting a predeclared function, calls f with arguments a1, a2, … an. Arguments are evaluated before the function is called. The type of the expression is the result type of f. In a function call, the function value and arguments are evaluated in the usual order. After they are evaluated, the parameters of the call are passed by value to the function and the called function begins execution. The return value of the function is passed by value when the function returns. Calling an undefined function causes a compile-time error. Operators combine operands into expressions. Comparisons are discussed elsewhere. For other binary operators, the operand types must be identical unless the operation involves shifts or untyped constants. For operations involving constants only, see the section on constant expressions. Except for shift operations, if one operand is an untyped constant and the other operand is not, the constant is converted to the type of the other operand. The right operand in a shift expression must have unsigned integer type or be an untyped constant that can be converted to unsigned integer type. If the left operand of a non-constant shift expression is an untyped constant, the type of the constant is what it would be if the shift expression were replaced by its left operand alone. Expressions of the form yield a boolean value true if expr2, a regular expression, matches expr1 (see also [6]). Both expression must be of type string. If any one of the expressions is NULL the result is NULL. Predicates are special form expressions having a boolean result type. Expressions of the form are equivalent, including NULL handling, to The types of involved expressions must be comparable as defined in "Comparison operators". Another form of the IN predicate creates the expression list from a result of a SelectStmt. The SelectStmt must select only one column. The produced expression list is resource limited by the memory available to the process. NULL values produced by the SelectStmt are ignored, but if all records of the SelectStmt are NULL the predicate yields NULL. The select statement is evaluated only once. If the type of expr is not the same as the type of the field returned by the SelectStmt then the set operation yields false. The type of the column returned by the SelectStmt must be one of the simple (non blob-like) types: Expressions of the form are equivalent, including NULL handling, to The types of involved expressions must be ordered as defined in "Comparison operators". Expressions of the form yield a boolean value true if expr does not have a specific type (case A) or if expr has a specific type (case B). In other cases the result is a boolean value false. Unary operators have the highest precedence. There are five precedence levels for binary operators. Multiplication operators bind strongest, followed by addition operators, comparison operators, && (logical AND), and finally || (logical OR) Binary operators of the same precedence associate from left to right. For instance, x / y * z is the same as (x / y) * z. Note that the operator precedence is reflected explicitly by the grammar. Arithmetic operators apply to numeric values and yield a result of the same type as the first operand. The four standard arithmetic operators (+, -, *, /) apply to integer, rational, floating-point, and complex types; + also applies to strings; +,- also applies to times. All other arithmetic operators apply to integers only. sum integers, rationals, floats, complex values, strings difference integers, rationals, floats, complex values, times product integers, rationals, floats, complex values / quotient integers, rationals, floats, complex values % remainder integers & bitwise AND integers | bitwise OR integers ^ bitwise XOR integers &^ bit clear (AND NOT) integers << left shift integer << unsigned integer >> right shift integer >> unsigned integer Strings can be concatenated using the + operator String addition creates a new string by concatenating the operands. A value of type duration can be added to or subtracted from a value of type time. Times can subtracted from each other producing a value of type duration. For two integer values x and y, the integer quotient q = x / y and remainder r = x % y satisfy the following relationships with x / y truncated towards zero ("truncated division"). As an exception to this rule, if the dividend x is the most negative value for the int type of x, the quotient q = x / -1 is equal to x (and r = 0). If the divisor is a constant expression, it must not be zero. If the divisor is zero at run time, a run-time error occurs. If the dividend is non-negative and the divisor is a constant power of 2, the division may be replaced by a right shift, and computing the remainder may be replaced by a bitwise AND operation The shift operators shift the left operand by the shift count specified by the right operand. They implement arithmetic shifts if the left operand is a signed integer and logical shifts if it is an unsigned integer. There is no upper limit on the shift count. Shifts behave as if the left operand is shifted n times by 1 for a shift count of n. As a result, x << 1 is the same as x*2 and x >> 1 is the same as x/2 but truncated towards negative infinity. For integer operands, the unary operators +, -, and ^ are defined as follows For floating-point and complex numbers, +x is the same as x, while -x is the negation of x. The result of a floating-point or complex division by zero is not specified beyond the IEEE-754 standard; whether a run-time error occurs is implementation-specific. Whenever any operand of any arithmetic operation, unary or binary, is NULL, as well as in the case of the string concatenating operation, the result is NULL. For unsigned integer values, the operations +, -, *, and << are computed modulo 2n, where n is the bit width of the unsigned integer's type. Loosely speaking, these unsigned integer operations discard high bits upon overflow, and expressions may rely on “wrap around”. For signed integers with a finite bit width, the operations +, -, *, and << may legally overflow and the resulting value exists and is deterministically defined by the signed integer representation, the operation, and its operands. No exception is raised as a result of overflow. An evaluator may not optimize an expression under the assumption that overflow does not occur. For instance, it may not assume that x < x + 1 is always true. Integers of type bigint and rationals do not overflow but their handling is limited by the memory resources available to the program. Comparison operators compare two operands and yield a boolean value. In any comparison, the first operand must be of same type as is the second operand, or vice versa. The equality operators == and != apply to operands that are comparable. The ordering operators <, <=, >, and >= apply to operands that are ordered. These terms and the result of the comparisons are defined as follows - Boolean values are comparable. Two boolean values are equal if they are either both true or both false. - Complex values are comparable. Two complex values u and v are equal if both real(u) == real(v) and imag(u) == imag(v). - Integer values are comparable and ordered, in the usual way. Note that durations are integers. - Floating point values are comparable and ordered, as defined by the IEEE-754 standard. - Rational values are comparable and ordered, in the usual way. - String values are comparable and ordered, lexically byte-wise. - Time values are comparable and ordered. Whenever any operand of any comparison operation is NULL, the result is NULL. Note that slices are always of type string. Logical operators apply to boolean values and yield a boolean result. The right operand is evaluated conditionally. The truth tables for logical operations with NULL values Conversions are expressions of the form T(x) where T is a type and x is an expression that can be converted to type T. A constant value x can be converted to type T in any of these cases: - x is representable by a value of type T. - x is a floating-point constant, T is a floating-point type, and x is representable by a value of type T after rounding using IEEE 754 round-to-even rules. The constant T(x) is the rounded value. - x is an integer constant and T is a string type. The same rule as for non-constant x applies in this case. Converting a constant yields a typed constant as result. A non-constant value x can be converted to type T in any of these cases: - x has type T. - x's type and T are both integer or floating point types. - x's type and T are both complex types. - x is an integer, except bigint or duration, and T is a string type. Specific rules apply to (non-constant) conversions between numeric types or to and from a string type. These conversions may change the representation of x and incur a run-time cost. All other conversions only change the type but not the representation of x. A conversion of NULL to any type yields NULL. For the conversion of non-constant numeric values, the following rules apply 1. When converting between integer types, if the value is a signed integer, it is sign extended to implicit infinite precision; otherwise it is zero extended. It is then truncated to fit in the result type's size. For example, if v == uint16(0x10F0), then uint32(int8(v)) == 0xFFFFFFF0. The conversion always yields a valid value; there is no indication of overflow. 2. When converting a floating-point number to an integer, the fraction is discarded (truncation towards zero). 3. When converting an integer or floating-point number to a floating-point type, or a complex number to another complex type, the result value is rounded to the precision specified by the destination type. For instance, the value of a variable x of type float32 may be stored using additional precision beyond that of an IEEE-754 32-bit number, but float32(x) represents the result of rounding x's value to 32-bit precision. Similarly, x + 0.1 may use more than 32 bits of precision, but float32(x + 0.1) does not. In all non-constant conversions involving floating-point or complex values, if the result type cannot represent the value the conversion succeeds but the result value is implementation-dependent. 1. Converting a signed or unsigned integer value to a string type yields a string containing the UTF-8 representation of the integer. Values outside the range of valid Unicode code points are converted to "\uFFFD". 2. Converting a blob to a string type yields a string whose successive bytes are the elements of the blob. 3. Converting a value of a string type to a blob yields a blob whose successive elements are the bytes of the string. 4. Converting a value of a bigint type to a string yields a string containing the decimal decimal representation of the integer. 5. Converting a value of a string type to a bigint yields a bigint value containing the integer represented by the string value. A prefix of “0x” or “0X” selects base 16; the “0” prefix selects base 8, and a “0b” or “0B” prefix selects base 2. Otherwise the value is interpreted in base 10. An error occurs if the string value is not in any valid format. 6. Converting a value of a rational type to a string yields a string containing the decimal decimal representation of the rational in the form "a/b" (even if b == 1). 7. Converting a value of a string type to a bigrat yields a bigrat value containing the rational represented by the string value. The string can be given as a fraction "a/b" or as a floating-point number optionally followed by an exponent. An error occurs if the string value is not in any valid format. 8. Converting a value of a duration type to a string returns a string representing the duration in the form "72h3m0.5s". Leading zero units are omitted. As a special case, durations less than one second format using a smaller unit (milli-, micro-, or nanoseconds) to ensure that the leading digit is non-zero. The zero duration formats as 0, with no unit. 9. Converting a string value to a duration yields a duration represented by the string. A duration string is a possibly signed sequence of decimal numbers, each with optional fraction and a unit suffix, such as "300ms", "-1.5h" or "2h45m". Valid time units are "ns", "us" (or "µs"), "ms", "s", "m", "h". 10. Converting a time value to a string returns the time formatted using the format string When evaluating the operands of an expression or of function calls, operations are evaluated in lexical left-to-right order. For example, in the evaluation of the function calls and evaluation of c happen in the order h(), i(), j(), c. Floating-point operations within a single expression are evaluated according to the associativity of the operators. Explicit parentheses affect the evaluation by overriding the default associativity. In the expression x + (y + z) the addition y + z is performed before adding x. Statements control execution. The empty statement does nothing. Alter table statements modify existing tables. With the ADD clause it adds a new column to the table. The column must not exist. With the DROP clause it removes an existing column from a table. The column must exist and it must be not the only (last) column of the table. IOW, there cannot be a table with no columns. For example When adding a column to a table with existing data, the constraint clause of the ColumnDef cannot be used. Adding a constrained column to an empty table is fine. Begin transactions statements introduce a new transaction level. Every transaction level must be eventually balanced by exactly one of COMMIT or ROLLBACK statements. Note that when a transaction is roll-backed because of a statement failure then no explicit balancing of the respective BEGIN TRANSACTION is statement is required nor permitted. Failure to properly balance any opened transaction level may cause dead locks and/or lose of data updated in the uppermost opened but never properly closed transaction level. For example A database cannot be updated (mutated) outside of a transaction. Statements requiring a transaction A database is effectively read only outside of a transaction. Statements not requiring a transaction The commit statement closes the innermost transaction nesting level. If that's the outermost level then the updates to the DB made by the transaction are atomically made persistent. For example Create index statements create new indices. Index is a named projection of ordered values of a table column to the respective records. As a special case the id() of the record can be indexed. Index name must not be the same as any of the existing tables and it also cannot be the same as of any column name of the table the index is on. For example Now certain SELECT statements may use the indices to speed up joins and/or to speed up record set filtering when the WHERE clause is used; or the indices might be used to improve the performance when the ORDER BY clause is present. The UNIQUE modifier requires the indexed values tuple to be index-wise unique or have all values NULL. The optional IF NOT EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the index already exists. A simple index consists of only one expression which must be either a column name or the built-in id(). A more complex and more general index is one that consists of more than one expression or its single expression does not qualify as a simple index. In this case the type of all expressions in the list must be one of the non blob-like types. Note: Blob-like types are blob, bigint, bigrat, time and duration. Create table statements create new tables. A column definition declares the column name and type. Table names and column names are case sensitive. Neither a table or an index of the same name may exist in the DB. For example The optional IF NOT EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the table already exists. The optional constraint clause has two forms. The first one is found in many SQL dialects. This form prevents the data in column DepartmentName to be NULL. The second form allows an arbitrary boolean expression to be used to validate the column. If the value of the expression is true then the validation succeeded. If the value of the expression is false or NULL then the validation fails. If the value of the expression is not of type bool an error occurs. The optional DEFAULT clause is an expression which, if present, is substituted instead of a NULL value when the colum is assigned a value. Note that the constraint and/or default expressions may refer to other columns by name: When a table row is inserted by the INSERT INTO statement or when a table row is updated by the UPDATE statement, the order of operations is as follows: 1. The new values of the affected columns are set and the values of all the row columns become the named values which can be referred to in default expressions evaluated in step 2. 2. If any row column value is NULL and the DEFAULT clause is present in the column's definition, the default expression is evaluated and its value is set as the respective column value. 3. The values, potentially updated, of row columns become the named values which can be referred to in constraint expressions evaluated during step 4. 4. All row columns which definition has the constraint clause present will have that constraint checked. If any constraint violation is detected, the overall operation fails and no changes to the table are made. Delete from statements remove rows from a table, which must exist. For example If the WHERE clause is not present then all rows are removed and the statement is equivalent to the TRUNCATE TABLE statement. Drop index statements remove indices from the DB. The index must exist. For example The optional IF EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the index does not exist. Drop table statements remove tables from the DB. The table must exist. For example The optional IF EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the table does not exist. Insert into statements insert new rows into tables. New rows come from literal data, if using the VALUES clause, or are a result of select statement. In the later case the select statement is fully evaluated before the insertion of any rows is performed, allowing to insert values calculated from the same table rows are to be inserted into. If the ColumnNameList part is omitted then the number of values inserted in the row must be the same as are columns in the table. If the ColumnNameList part is present then the number of values per row must be same as the same number of column names. All other columns of the record are set to NULL. The type of the value assigned to a column must be the same as is the column's type or the value must be NULL. For example If any of the columns of the table were defined using the optional constraints clause or the optional defaults clause then those are processed on a per row basis. The details are discussed in the "Constraints and defaults" chapter below the CREATE TABLE statement documentation. Explain statement produces a recordset consisting of lines of text which describe the execution plan of a statement, if any. For example, the QL tool treats the explain statement specially and outputs the joined lines: The explanation may aid in uderstanding how a statement/query would be executed and if indices are used as expected - or which indices may possibly improve the statement performance. The create index statements above were directly copy/pasted in the terminal from the suggestions provided by the filter recordset pipeline part returned by the explain statement. If the statement has nothing special in its plan, the result is the original statement. To get an explanation of the select statement of the IN predicate, use the EXPLAIN statement with that particular select statement. The rollback statement closes the innermost transaction nesting level discarding any updates to the DB made by it. If that's the outermost level then the effects on the DB are as if the transaction never happened. For example The (temporary) record set from the last statement is returned and can be processed by the client. In this case the rollback is the same as 'DROP TABLE tmp;' but it can be a more complex operation. Select from statements produce recordsets. The optional DISTINCT modifier ensures all rows in the result recordset are unique. Either all of the resulting fields are returned ('*') or only those named in FieldList. RecordSetList is a list of table names or parenthesized select statements, optionally (re)named using the AS clause. The result can be filtered using a WhereClause and orderd by the OrderBy clause. For example If Recordset is a nested, parenthesized SelectStmt then it must be given a name using the AS clause if its field are to be accessible in expressions. A field is an named expression. Identifiers, not used as a type in conversion or a function name in the Call clause, denote names of (other) fields, values of which should be used in the expression. The expression can be named using the AS clause. If the AS clause is not present and the expression consists solely of a field name, then that field name is used as the name of the resulting field. Otherwise the field is unnamed. For example The SELECT statement can optionally enumerate the desired/resulting fields in a list. No two identical field names can appear in the list. When more than one record set is used in the FROM clause record set list, the result record set field names are rewritten to be qualified using the record set names. If a particular record set doesn't have a name, its respective fields became unnamed. The optional JOIN clause, for example is mostly equal to except that the rows from a which, when they appear in the cross join, never made expr to evaluate to true, are combined with a virtual row from b, containing all nulls, and added to the result set. For the RIGHT JOIN variant the discussed rules are used for rows from b not satisfying expr == true and the virtual, all-null row "comes" from a. The FULL JOIN adds the respective rows which would be otherwise provided by the separate executions of the LEFT JOIN and RIGHT JOIN variants. For more thorough OUTER JOIN discussion please see the Wikipedia article at [10]. Resultins rows of a SELECT statement can be optionally ordered by the ORDER BY clause. Collating proceeds by considering the expressions in the expression list left to right until a collating order is determined. Any possibly remaining expressions are not evaluated. All of the expression values must yield an ordered type or NULL. Ordered types are defined in "Comparison operators". Collating of elements having a NULL value is different compared to what the comparison operators yield in expression evaluation (NULL result instead of a boolean value). Below, T denotes a non NULL value of any QL type. NULL collates before any non NULL value (is considered smaller than T). Two NULLs have no collating order (are considered equal). The WHERE clause restricts records considered by some statements, like SELECT FROM, DELETE FROM, or UPDATE. It is an error if the expression evaluates to a non null value of non bool type. The GROUP BY clause is used to project rows having common values into a smaller set of rows. For example Using the GROUP BY without any aggregate functions in the selected fields is in certain cases equal to using the DISTINCT modifier. The last two examples above produce the same resultsets. The optional OFFSET clause allows to ignore first N records. For example The above will produce only rows 11, 12, ... of the record set, if they exist. The value of the expression must a non negative integer, but not bigint or duration. The optional LIMIT clause allows to ignore all but first N records. For example The above will return at most the first 10 records of the record set. The value of the expression must a non negative integer, but not bigint or duration. The LIMIT and OFFSET clauses can be combined. For example Considering table t has, say 10 records, the above will produce only records 4 - 8. After returning record #8, no more result rows/records are computed. 1. The FROM clause is evaluated, producing a Cartesian product of its source record sets (tables or nested SELECT statements). 2. If present, the JOIN cluase is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation and the recordset specified by the JOIN clause. (... JOIN Recordset ON ...) 3. If present, the WHERE clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation. 4. If present, the GROUP BY clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 5. The SELECT field expressions are evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 6. If present, the DISTINCT modifier is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 7. If present, the ORDER BY clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 8. If present, the OFFSET clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). The offset expression is evaluated once for the first record produced by the previous evaluations. 9. If present, the LIMIT clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). The limit expression is evaluated once for the first record produced by the previous evaluations. Truncate table statements remove all records from a table. The table must exist. For example Update statements change values of fields in rows of a table. For example Note: The SET clause is optional. If any of the columns of the table were defined using the optional constraints clause or the optional defaults clause then those are processed on a per row basis. The details are discussed in the "Constraints and defaults" chapter below the CREATE TABLE statement documentation. To allow to query for DB meta data, there exist specially named tables, some of them being virtual. Note: Virtual system tables may have fake table-wise unique but meaningless and unstable record IDs. Do not apply the built-in id() to any system table. The table __Table lists all tables in the DB. The schema is The Schema column returns the statement to (re)create table Name. This table is virtual. The table __Colum lists all columns of all tables in the DB. The schema is The Ordinal column defines the 1-based index of the column in the record. This table is virtual. The table __Colum2 lists all columns of all tables in the DB which have the constraint NOT NULL or which have a constraint expression defined or which have a default expression defined. The schema is It's possible to obtain a consolidated recordset for all properties of all DB columns using The Name column is the column name in TableName. The table __Index lists all indices in the DB. The schema is The IsUnique columns reflects if the index was created using the optional UNIQUE clause. This table is virtual. Built-in functions are predeclared. The built-in aggregate function avg returns the average of values of an expression. Avg ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if avg is applied to an empty record set. The column values must be of a numeric type. The built-in function contains returns true if substr is within s. If any argument to contains is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in aggregate function count returns how many times an expression has a non NULL values or the number of rows in a record set. Note: count() returns 0 for an empty record set. For example Date returns the time corresponding to in the appropriate zone for that time in the given location. The month, day, hour, min, sec, and nsec values may be outside their usual ranges and will be normalized during the conversion. For example, October 32 converts to November 1. A daylight savings time transition skips or repeats times. For example, in the United States, March 13, 2011 2:15am never occurred, while November 6, 2011 1:15am occurred twice. In such cases, the choice of time zone, and therefore the time, is not well-defined. Date returns a time that is correct in one of the two zones involved in the transition, but it does not guarantee which. A location maps time instants to the zone in use at that time. Typically, the location represents the collection of time offsets in use in a geographical area, such as "CEST" and "CET" for central Europe. "local" represents the system's local time zone. "UTC" represents Universal Coordinated Time (UTC). The month specifies a month of the year (January = 1, ...). If any argument to date is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function day returns the day of the month specified by t. If the argument to day is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function formatTime returns a textual representation of the time value formatted according to layout, which defines the format by showing how the reference time, would be displayed if it were the value; it serves as an example of the desired output. The same display rules will then be applied to the time value. If any argument to formatTime is NULL the result is NULL. NOTE: The string value of the time zone, like "CET" or "ACDT", is dependent on the time zone of the machine the function is run on. For example, if the t value is in "CET", but the machine is in "ACDT", instead of "CET" the result is "+0100". This is the same what Go (time.Time).String() returns and in fact formatTime directly calls t.String(). returns on a machine in the CET time zone, but may return on a machine in the ACDT zone. The time value is in both cases the same so its ordering and comparing is correct. Only the display value can differ. The built-in functions formatFloat and formatInt format numbers to strings using go's number format functions in the `strconv` package. For all three functions, only the first argument is mandatory. The default values of the rest are shown in the examples. If the first argument is NULL, the result is NULL. returns returns returns Unlike the `strconv` equivalent, the formatInt function handles all integer types, both signed and unsigned. The built-in function hasPrefix tests whether the string s begins with prefix. If any argument to hasPrefix is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function hasSuffix tests whether the string s ends with suffix. If any argument to hasSuffix is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function hour returns the hour within the day specified by t, in the range [0, 23]. If the argument to hour is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function hours returns the duration as a floating point number of hours. If the argument to hours is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function id takes zero or one arguments. If no argument is provided, id() returns a table-unique automatically assigned numeric identifier of type int. Ids of deleted records are not reused unless the DB becomes completely empty (has no tables). For example If id() without arguments is called for a row which is not a table record then the result value is NULL. For example If id() has one argument it must be a table name of a table in a cross join. For example The built-in function len takes a string argument and returns the lentgh of the string in bytes. The expression len(s) is constant if s is a string constant. If the argument to len is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in aggregate function max returns the largest value of an expression in a record set. Max ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if max is applied to an empty record set. The expression values must be of an ordered type. For example The built-in aggregate function min returns the smallest value of an expression in a record set. Min ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if min is applied to an empty record set. For example The column values must be of an ordered type. The built-in function minute returns the minute offset within the hour specified by t, in the range [0, 59]. If the argument to minute is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function minutes returns the duration as a floating point number of minutes. If the argument to minutes is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function month returns the month of the year specified by t (January = 1, ...). If the argument to month is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function nanosecond returns the nanosecond offset within the second specified by t, in the range [0, 999999999]. If the argument to nanosecond is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function nanoseconds returns the duration as an integer nanosecond count. If the argument to nanoseconds is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function now returns the current local time. The built-in function parseTime parses a formatted string and returns the time value it represents. The layout defines the format by showing how the reference time, would be interpreted if it were the value; it serves as an example of the input format. The same interpretation will then be made to the input string. Elements omitted from the value are assumed to be zero or, when zero is impossible, one, so parsing "3:04pm" returns the time corresponding to Jan 1, year 0, 15:04:00 UTC (note that because the year is 0, this time is before the zero Time). Years must be in the range 0000..9999. The day of the week is checked for syntax but it is otherwise ignored. In the absence of a time zone indicator, parseTime returns a time in UTC. When parsing a time with a zone offset like -0700, if the offset corresponds to a time zone used by the current location, then parseTime uses that location and zone in the returned time. Otherwise it records the time as being in a fabricated location with time fixed at the given zone offset. When parsing a time with a zone abbreviation like MST, if the zone abbreviation has a defined offset in the current location, then that offset is used. The zone abbreviation "UTC" is recognized as UTC regardless of location. If the zone abbreviation is unknown, Parse records the time as being in a fabricated location with the given zone abbreviation and a zero offset. This choice means that such a time can be parses and reformatted with the same layout losslessly, but the exact instant used in the representation will differ by the actual zone offset. To avoid such problems, prefer time layouts that use a numeric zone offset. If any argument to parseTime is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function second returns the second offset within the minute specified by t, in the range [0, 59]. If the argument to second is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function seconds returns the duration as a floating point number of seconds. If the argument to seconds is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function since returns the time elapsed since t. It is shorthand for now()-t. If the argument to since is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in aggregate function sum returns the sum of values of an expression for all rows of a record set. Sum ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if sum is applied to an empty record set. The column values must be of a numeric type. The built-in function timeIn returns t with the location information set to loc. For discussion of the loc argument please see date(). If any argument to timeIn is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function weekday returns the day of the week specified by t. Sunday == 0, Monday == 1, ... If the argument to weekday is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function year returns the year in which t occurs. If the argument to year is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function yearDay returns the day of the year specified by t, in the range [1,365] for non-leap years, and [1,366] in leap years. If the argument to yearDay is NULL the result is NULL. Three functions assemble and disassemble complex numbers. The built-in function complex constructs a complex value from a floating-point real and imaginary part, while real and imag extract the real and imaginary parts of a complex value. The type of the arguments and return value correspond. For complex, the two arguments must be of the same floating-point type and the return type is the complex type with the corresponding floating-point constituents: complex64 for float32, complex128 for float64. The real and imag functions together form the inverse, so for a complex value z, z == complex(real(z), imag(z)). If the operands of these functions are all constants, the return value is a constant. If any argument to any of complex, real, imag functions is NULL the result is NULL. For the numeric types, the following sizes are guaranteed Portions of this specification page are modifications based on work[2] created and shared by Google[3] and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License[4]. This specification is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, and code is licensed under a BSD license[5]. Links from the above documentation This section is not part of the specification. WARNING: The implementation of indices is new and it surely needs more time to become mature. Indices are used currently used only by the WHERE clause. The following expression patterns of 'WHERE expression' are recognized and trigger index use. The relOp is one of the relation operators <, <=, ==, >=, >. For the equality operator both operands must be of comparable types. For all other operators both operands must be of ordered types. The constant expression is a compile time constant expression. Some constant folding is still a TODO. Parameter is a QL parameter ($1 etc.). Consider tables t and u, both with an indexed field f. The WHERE expression doesn't comply with the above simple detected cases. However, such query is now automatically rewritten to which will use both of the indices. The impact of using the indices can be substantial (cf. BenchmarkCrossJoin*) if the resulting rows have low "selectivity", ie. only few rows from both tables are selected by the respective WHERE filtering. Note: Existing QL DBs can be used and indices can be added to them. However, once any indices are present in the DB, the old QL versions cannot work with such DB anymore. Running a benchmark with -v (-test.v) outputs information about the scale used to report records/s and a brief description of the benchmark. For example Running the full suite of benchmarks takes a lot of time. Use the -timeout flag to avoid them being killed after the default time limit (10 minutes).
Multi-device Android Debug Bridge The madb command wraps Android Debug Bridge (adb) command line tool and provides various features for controlling multiple Android devices concurrently. Usage: The madb commands are: The madb flags are: The global flags are: Clears your app data from all devices. To specify which user's data should be cleared, use 'madb user set' command to set the default user ID for that device. (See 'madb help user' for more details.) Usage: <application_id> is usually the package name where the activities are defined. (See: http://tools.android.com/tech-docs/new-build-system/applicationid-vs-packagename) If the application ID is not specified, madb automatically determines which app to be cleared, based on the build scripts found in the current working directory. If the working directory contains a Gradle Android project (i.e., has "build.gradle"), run a small Gradle script to extract the application ID. In this case, the extracted ID is cached, so that "madb clear-data" can be repeated without even running the Gradle script again. The ID can be re-extracted by clearing the cache by providing "-clear-cache" flag. The madb clear-data flags are: Runs the provided adb command on all devices and emulators concurrently. For example, the following line: copies the ./foo.txt file to /sdcard/foo.txt for all the currently connected devices. There are a few pre-defined keywords that can be expanded within an argument. For example, the following line: copies the ./Alice.txt file to the device named Alice, and ./Bob.txt to the device named Bob. Note that you should type in "{{name}}" as-is, with the opening/closing curly braces, similar to when you're using a template library such as mustache. To see the list of available adb commands, type 'adb help'. Usage: <command> is a normal adb command, which will be executed on all devices and emulators. The madb exec flags are: Runs the provided external command for all devices and emulators concurrently. For each available device, this command will spawn a sub-shell with the ANDROID_SERIAL environmental variable set to the target device serial, and then will run the provided external command. There are a few pre-defined keywords that can be expanded within an argument. For example, the following line: prints out the name and serial pairs for each device. Note that you should type in "{{name}}" as-is, with the opening/closing curly braces, similar to when you're using a template library such as mustache. This command is intended to be used with external commands that are designed to work with only a single device at a time (e.g. gomobile, flutter). Usage: <external_command> is an external shell command to run for all devices and emulators. The madb extern flags are: Manages device groups, each of which can have one or more device members. The device groups can be used for specifying the target devices of other madb commands. Usage: The madb group commands are: Adds members to a device group. This command also creates the group, if the group does not exist yet. The device group can be used when specifying devices in any madb commands. When creating a new device group with this command, the provided name must not conflict with an existing device nickname (see: madb help name set). A group can contain another device group, in which case all the members of the other group will also be considered as members of the current group. Usage: <group_name> is an alpha-numeric string with no special characters or spaces. This name must not be an existing device nickname. <member> is a member specifier, which can be one of device serial, qualifier, device index (e.g., '@1', '@2'), device nickname, or another device group. Clears all the existing device groups. Usage: Deletes an existing device group. Usage: <group_name> the name of an existing device group. You can specify more than one group names. Lists the name and members of all the existing device groups. Usage: Removes members from an existing device group. If there are no remaining members after that, the group gets deleted. Usage: <group_name> is an alpha-numeric string with no special characters or spaces. This name must be an existing device group name. <member> is a member specifier, which can be one of device serial, qualifier, device index (e.g., '@1', '@2'), device nickname, or another device group. Renames an existing device group. Usage: <old_name> is the name of an existing device group. <new_name> is the new name for the existing group. This must be an alpha-numeric string with no special characters or spaces, and must not conflict with another existing device or group name. Installs your app on all devices. If the working directory contains a Gradle Android project (i.e., has "build.gradle"), this command will first run a small Gradle script to extract the variant properties, which will be used to find the best matching .apk for each device. These extracted properties are cached, and "madb install" can be repeated without running this Gradle script again. The properties can be re-extracted by clearing the cache by providing "-clear-cache" flag. Once the variant properties are extracted, the best matching .apk for each device will be installed in parallel. This command is similar to running "gradlew :<moduleName>:<variantName>Install", but "madb install" is more flexible: 1) you can install the app to a subset of the devices, and 2) the app is installed concurrently, which saves a lot of time. If the working directory contains a Flutter project (i.e., has "flutter.yaml"), this command will run "flutter install --device-id <device serial>" for all devices. To install your app for a specific user on a particular device, use 'madb user set' command to set the default user ID for that device. (See 'madb help user' for more details.) To install a specific .apk file to all devices, use "madb exec install <path_to_apk>" instead. Usage: The madb install flags are: Manages device nicknames, which are meant to be more human-friendly compared to the device serials provided by adb tool. Usage: The madb name commands are: Sets a human-friendly nickname that can be used when specifying the device in any madb commands. The device serial can be obtained using the 'adb devices -l' command. For example, consider the following example output: The first value, 'HT4BVWV00023', is the device serial. To assign a nickname for this device, run the following command: and it will assign the 'MyTablet' nickname to the device serial 'HT4BVWV00023'. The alternative device specifiers (e.g., 'usb:3-3.4.2', 'product:volantisg') can also have nicknames. When a nickname is set for a device serial, the nickname can be used to specify the device within madb commands. There can only be one nickname for a device serial. When the 'madb name set' command is invoked with a device serial with an already assigned nickname, the old one will be replaced with the newly provided one. Usage: <device_serial> is a device serial (e.g., 'HT4BVWV00023') or an alternative device qualifier (e.g., 'usb:3-3.4.2') obtained from 'adb devices -l' command <nickname> is an alpha-numeric string with no special characters or spaces. Unsets a nickname assigned by the 'madb name set' command. Either the device serial or the assigned nickname can be specified to remove the mapping. Usage: There should be only one argument, which is either the device serial or the nickname. Lists all the currently stored nicknames of device serials. Usage: Clears all the currently stored nicknames of device serials. Usage: Resolves the provided device specifiers and prints out their device serials, each in a separate line. This command only displays the unique serials of the devices that are currently available. This command can be useful when you want to use the device nicknames and groups defined by madb in other command line tools. For example, to run a flutter app on "MyTablet" device, you can use the following command (in Bash): Usage: <specifier> can be anything that is accepted in the '-n' flag (see 'madb help'). It can be a device serial, qualifier, index, nickname, or a device group name. Runs the provided adb shell command on all devices and emulators concurrently. This command is a shorthand syntax for 'madb exec shell <command...>'. See 'madb help exec' for more details. Usage: <command> is a normal adb shell command, which will be executed on all devices and emulators. The madb shell flags are: Launches your app on all devices. In most cases, running "madb start" from an Android Gradle project directory will do the right thing for you. "madb start" will build the project first. After the project build is completed, this command will install the best matching .apk for each device, only if one or more of the following conditions are met: If you would like to run the same version of the app repeatedly (e.g., for QA testing), you can explicitly turn off the build flag by providing "-build=false" to skip the build step. To run your app as a specific user on a particular device, use 'madb user set' command to set the default user ID for that device. (See 'madb help user' for more details.) Usage: <application_id> is usually the package name where the activities are defined. (See: http://tools.android.com/tech-docs/new-build-system/applicationid-vs-packagename) <activity_name> is the Java class name for the activity you want to launch. If the package name of the activity is different from the application ID, the activity name must be a fully-qualified name (e.g., com.yourcompany.yourapp.MainActivity). If either <application_id> or <activity_name> is provided, the other must be provided as well. If no arguments are specified, madb automatically determines which app to launch, based on the build scripts found in the current working directory. 1) If the working directory contains a Flutter project (i.e., has "flutter.yaml"), this command will run "flutter start --device-id <device serial>" for all the specified devices. 2) If the working directory contains a Gradle Android project (i.e., has "build.gradle"), this command will run a small Gradle script to extract the application ID and the main activity name. In this case, the extracted IDs are cached, so that "madb start" can be repeated without even running the Gradle script again. The IDs can be re-extracted by clearing the cache by providing "-clear-cache" flag. The madb start flags are: Stops your app on all devices. To stop your app for a specific user on a particular device, use 'madb user set' command to set the default user ID for that device. (See 'madb help user' for more details.) Usage: <application_id> is usually the package name where the activities are defined. (See: http://tools.android.com/tech-docs/new-build-system/applicationid-vs-packagename) If the application ID is not specified, madb automatically determines which app to stop, based on the build scripts found in the current working directory. 1) If the working directory contains a Flutter project (i.e., has "flutter.yaml"), this command will run "flutter stop --device-id <device serial>" for all the specified devices. 2) If the working directory contains a Gradle Android project (i.e., has "build.gradle"), run a small Gradle script to extract the application ID. In this case, the extracted ID is cached, so that "madb stop" can be repeated without even running the Gradle script again. The ID can be re-extracted by clearing the cache by providing "-clear-cache" flag. The madb stop flags are: Uninstall your app from all devices. To uninstall your app for a specific user on a particular device, use 'madb user set' command to set the default user ID for that device. (See 'madb help user' for more details.) Usage: <application_id> is usually the package name where the activities are defined. (See: http://tools.android.com/tech-docs/new-build-system/applicationid-vs-packagename) If the application_id is not specified, madb automatically determines which app to uninstall, based on the build scripts found in the current working directory. If the working directory contains a Gradle Android project (i.e., has "build.gradle"), run a small Gradle script to extract the application ID. In this case, the extracted ID is cached, so that "madb uninstall" can be repeated without even running the Gradle script again. The ID can be re-extracted by clearing the cache by providing "-clear-cache" flag. The madb uninstall flags are: Manages default user settings for each device. An Android device can have multiple user accounts, and each user account has a numeric ID associated with it. Certain adb commands accept '--user <user_id>' as a parameter to allow specifying which of the Android user account should be used when running the command. The default behavior when the user ID is not provided varies by the adb command being run. Some madb commands internally run these adb commands which accept the '--user' flag. You can let madb use different user IDs for different devices by storing the default user ID for each device using 'madb user set' command. If the default user ID is not set for a particular device, madb will not provide the '--user' flag to the underlying adb command, and the current user will be used for that device as a result. Below is the list of madb commands which are affected by the default user ID settings: For more details on how to obtain the user ID from an Android device, see 'madb user help set'. Usage: The madb user commands are: Sets a default user ID to be used for the specified device, when there are multiple user accounts on a single device. The user IDs can be obtained using the 'adb [<device_serial>] shell pm list users' command. Alternatively, you can use 'madb exec' if you want to specify the device with a nickname. For example, running the following command: will list the available users and their IDs on the MyPhone device. Consider the following example output: There are two available users, "John Doe" and "Work profile". Each user is assigned a "user ID", which appears on the left of the user name. In this case, the user ID of "John Doe" is "0", and the user ID of the "Work profile" is "10". To use the "Work profile" as the default user when running madb commands on this device, run the following command: and then madb will use "Work profile" as the default user for device "MyPhone" in any of the subsequence madb commands. Usage: <device_serial> is the unique serial number for the device, which can be obtained from 'adb devices'. <user_id> is one of the user IDs obtained from 'adb shell pm list users' command. Unsets the default user ID assigned by the 'madb user set' command for the specified device. Running this command without any device specifiers will unset the default users only for the currently available devices and emulators, while keeping the default user IDs for the other devices. Usage: <device_serial> is the unique serial number for the device, which can be obtained from 'adb devices'. Lists all the currently stored default user IDs for devices. Usage: Clears all the currently stored default user IDs for devices. This command clears the default user IDs regardless of whether the device is currently connected or not. Usage: Prints the madb version number to the console. If this version of madb binary is an official release, this command will show the version number. Otherwise, the version will be in the form of "<version>-develop", where the version indicates the most recent stable release version prior to this version of madb binary. Usage: Help with no args displays the usage of the parent command. Help with args displays the usage of the specified sub-command or help topic. "help ..." recursively displays help for all commands and topics. Usage: [command/topic ...] optionally identifies a specific sub-command or help topic. The madb help flags are:
Package ql implements a pure Go embedded SQL database engine. QL is a member of the SQL family of languages. It is less complex and less powerful than SQL (whichever specification SQL is considered to be). 2017-01-10: Release v1.1.0 fixes some bugs and adds a configurable WAL headroom. 2016-07-29: Release v1.0.6 enables alternatively using = instead of == for equality operation. 2016-07-11: Release v1.0.5 undoes vendoring of lldb. QL now uses stable lldb (github.com/cznic/lldb). 2016-07-06: Release v1.0.4 fixes a panic when closing the WAL file. 2016-04-03: Release v1.0.3 fixes a data race. 2016-03-23: Release v1.0.2 vendors github.com/cznic/exp/lldb and github.com/camlistore/go4/lock. 2016-03-17: Release v1.0.1 adjusts for latest goyacc. Parser error messages are improved and changed, but their exact form is not considered a API change. 2016-03-05: The current version has been tagged v1.0.0. 2015-06-15: To improve compatibility with other SQL implementations, the count built-in aggregate function now accepts * as its argument. 2015-05-29: The execution planner was rewritten from scratch. It should use indices in all places where they were used before plus in some additional situations. It is possible to investigate the plan using the newly added EXPLAIN statement. The QL tool is handy for such analysis. If the planner would have used an index, but no such exists, the plan includes hints in form of copy/paste ready CREATE INDEX statements. The planner is still quite simple and a lot of work on it is yet ahead. You can help this process by filling an issue with a schema and query which fails to use an index or indices when it should, in your opinion. Bonus points for including output of `ql 'explain <query>'`. 2015-05-09: The grammar of the CREATE INDEX statement now accepts an expression list instead of a single expression, which was further limited to just a column name or the built-in id(). As a side effect, composite indices are now functional. However, the values in the expression-list style index are not yet used by other statements or the statement/query planner. The composite index is useful while having UNIQUE clause to check for semantically duplicate rows before they get added to the table or when such a row is mutated using the UPDATE statement and the expression-list style index tuple of the row is thus recomputed. 2015-05-02: The Schema field of table __Table now correctly reflects any column constraints and/or defaults. Also, the (*DB).Info method now has that information provided in new ColumInfo fields NotNull, Constraint and Default. 2015-04-20: Added support for {LEFT,RIGHT,FULL} [OUTER] JOIN. 2015-04-18: Column definitions can now have constraints and defaults. Details are discussed in the "Constraints and defaults" chapter below the CREATE TABLE statement documentation. 2015-03-06: New built-in functions formatFloat and formatInt. Thanks urandom! (https://github.com/urandom) 2015-02-16: IN predicate now accepts a SELECT statement. See the updated "Predicates" section. 2015-01-17: Logical operators || and && have now alternative spellings: OR and AND (case insensitive). AND was a keyword before, but OR is a new one. This can possibly break existing queries. For the record, it's a good idea to not use any name appearing in, for example, [7] in your queries as the list of QL's keywords may expand for gaining better compatibility with existing SQL "standards". 2015-01-12: ACID guarantees were tightened at the cost of performance in some cases. The write collecting window mechanism, a formerly used implementation detail, was removed. Inserting rows one by one in a transaction is now slow. I mean very slow. Try to avoid inserting single rows in a transaction. Instead, whenever possible, perform batch updates of tens to, say thousands of rows in a single transaction. See also: http://www.sqlite.org/faq.html#q19, the discussed synchronization principles involved are the same as for QL, modulo minor details. Note: A side effect is that closing a DB before exiting an application, both for the Go API and through database/sql driver, is no more required, strictly speaking. Beware that exiting an application while there is an open (uncommitted) transaction in progress means losing the transaction data. However, the DB will not become corrupted because of not closing it. Nor that was the case before, but formerly failing to close a DB could have resulted in losing the data of the last transaction. 2014-09-21: id() now optionally accepts a single argument - a table name. 2014-09-01: Added the DB.Flush() method and the LIKE pattern matching predicate. 2014-08-08: The built in functions max and min now accept also time values. Thanks opennota! (https://github.com/opennota) 2014-06-05: RecordSet interface extended by new methods FirstRow and Rows. 2014-06-02: Indices on id() are now used by SELECT statements. 2014-05-07: Introduction of Marshal, Schema, Unmarshal. 2014-04-15: Added optional IF NOT EXISTS clause to CREATE INDEX and optional IF EXISTS clause to DROP INDEX. 2014-04-12: The column Unique in the virtual table __Index was renamed to IsUnique because the old name is a keyword. Unfortunately, this is a breaking change, sorry. 2014-04-11: Introduction of LIMIT, OFFSET. 2014-04-10: Introduction of query rewriting. 2014-04-07: Introduction of indices. QL imports zappy[8], a block-based compressor, which speeds up its performance by using a C version of the compression/decompression algorithms. If a CGO-free (pure Go) version of QL, or an app using QL, is required, please include 'purego' in the -tags option of go {build,get,install}. For example: If zappy was installed before installing QL, it might be necessary to rebuild zappy first (or rebuild QL with all its dependencies using the -a option): The syntax is specified using Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF) Lower-case production names are used to identify lexical tokens. Non-terminals are in CamelCase. Lexical tokens are enclosed in double quotes "" or back quotes “. The form a … b represents the set of characters from a through b as alternatives. The horizontal ellipsis … is also used elsewhere in the spec to informally denote various enumerations or code snippets that are not further specified. QL source code is Unicode text encoded in UTF-8. The text is not canonicalized, so a single accented code point is distinct from the same character constructed from combining an accent and a letter; those are treated as two code points. For simplicity, this document will use the unqualified term character to refer to a Unicode code point in the source text. Each code point is distinct; for instance, upper and lower case letters are different characters. Implementation restriction: For compatibility with other tools, the parser may disallow the NUL character (U+0000) in the statement. Implementation restriction: A byte order mark is disallowed anywhere in QL statements. The following terms are used to denote specific character classes The underscore character _ (U+005F) is considered a letter. Lexical elements are comments, tokens, identifiers, keywords, operators and delimiters, integer, floating-point, imaginary, rune and string literals and QL parameters. Line comments start with the character sequence // or -- and stop at the end of the line. A line comment acts like a space. General comments start with the character sequence /* and continue through the character sequence */. A general comment acts like a space. Comments do not nest. Tokens form the vocabulary of QL. There are four classes: identifiers, keywords, operators and delimiters, and literals. White space, formed from spaces (U+0020), horizontal tabs (U+0009), carriage returns (U+000D), and newlines (U+000A), is ignored except as it separates tokens that would otherwise combine into a single token. The formal grammar uses semicolons ";" as separators of QL statements. A single QL statement or the last QL statement in a list of statements can have an optional semicolon terminator. (Actually a separator from the following empty statement.) Identifiers name entities such as tables or record set columns. An identifier is a sequence of one or more letters and digits. The first character in an identifier must be a letter. For example No identifiers are predeclared, however note that no keyword can be used as an identifier. Identifiers starting with two underscores are used for meta data virtual tables names. For forward compatibility, users should generally avoid using any identifiers starting with two underscores. For example The following keywords are reserved and may not be used as identifiers. Keywords are not case sensitive. The following character sequences represent operators, delimiters, and other special tokens Operators consisting of more than one character are referred to by names in the rest of the documentation An integer literal is a sequence of digits representing an integer constant. An optional prefix sets a non-decimal base: 0 for octal, 0x or 0X for hexadecimal. In hexadecimal literals, letters a-f and A-F represent values 10 through 15. For example A floating-point literal is a decimal representation of a floating-point constant. It has an integer part, a decimal point, a fractional part, and an exponent part. The integer and fractional part comprise decimal digits; the exponent part is an e or E followed by an optionally signed decimal exponent. One of the integer part or the fractional part may be elided; one of the decimal point or the exponent may be elided. For example An imaginary literal is a decimal representation of the imaginary part of a complex constant. It consists of a floating-point literal or decimal integer followed by the lower-case letter i. For example A rune literal represents a rune constant, an integer value identifying a Unicode code point. A rune literal is expressed as one or more characters enclosed in single quotes. Within the quotes, any character may appear except single quote and newline. A single quoted character represents the Unicode value of the character itself, while multi-character sequences beginning with a backslash encode values in various formats. The simplest form represents the single character within the quotes; since QL statements are Unicode characters encoded in UTF-8, multiple UTF-8-encoded bytes may represent a single integer value. For instance, the literal 'a' holds a single byte representing a literal a, Unicode U+0061, value 0x61, while 'ä' holds two bytes (0xc3 0xa4) representing a literal a-dieresis, U+00E4, value 0xe4. Several backslash escapes allow arbitrary values to be encoded as ASCII text. There are four ways to represent the integer value as a numeric constant: \x followed by exactly two hexadecimal digits; \u followed by exactly four hexadecimal digits; \U followed by exactly eight hexadecimal digits, and a plain backslash \ followed by exactly three octal digits. In each case the value of the literal is the value represented by the digits in the corresponding base. Although these representations all result in an integer, they have different valid ranges. Octal escapes must represent a value between 0 and 255 inclusive. Hexadecimal escapes satisfy this condition by construction. The escapes \u and \U represent Unicode code points so within them some values are illegal, in particular those above 0x10FFFF and surrogate halves. After a backslash, certain single-character escapes represent special values All other sequences starting with a backslash are illegal inside rune literals. For example A string literal represents a string constant obtained from concatenating a sequence of characters. There are two forms: raw string literals and interpreted string literals. Raw string literals are character sequences between back quotes “. Within the quotes, any character is legal except back quote. The value of a raw string literal is the string composed of the uninterpreted (implicitly UTF-8-encoded) characters between the quotes; in particular, backslashes have no special meaning and the string may contain newlines. Carriage returns inside raw string literals are discarded from the raw string value. Interpreted string literals are character sequences between double quotes "". The text between the quotes, which may not contain newlines, forms the value of the literal, with backslash escapes interpreted as they are in rune literals (except that \' is illegal and \" is legal), with the same restrictions. The three-digit octal (\nnn) and two-digit hexadecimal (\xnn) escapes represent individual bytes of the resulting string; all other escapes represent the (possibly multi-byte) UTF-8 encoding of individual characters. Thus inside a string literal \377 and \xFF represent a single byte of value 0xFF=255, while ÿ, \u00FF, \U000000FF and \xc3\xbf represent the two bytes 0xc3 0xbf of the UTF-8 encoding of character U+00FF. For example These examples all represent the same string If the statement source represents a character as two code points, such as a combining form involving an accent and a letter, the result will be an error if placed in a rune literal (it is not a single code point), and will appear as two code points if placed in a string literal. Literals are assigned their values from the respective text representation at "compile" (parse) time. QL parameters provide the same functionality as literals, but their value is assigned at execution time from an expression list passed to DB.Run or DB.Execute. Using '?' or '$' is completely equivalent. For example Keywords 'false' and 'true' (not case sensitive) represent the two possible constant values of type bool (also not case sensitive). Keyword 'NULL' (not case sensitive) represents an untyped constant which is assignable to any type. NULL is distinct from any other value of any type. A type determines the set of values and operations specific to values of that type. A type is specified by a type name. Named instances of the boolean, numeric, and string types are keywords. The names are not case sensitive. Note: The blob type is exchanged between the back end and the API as []byte. On 32 bit platforms this limits the size which the implementation can handle to 2G. A boolean type represents the set of Boolean truth values denoted by the predeclared constants true and false. The predeclared boolean type is bool. A duration type represents the elapsed time between two instants as an int64 nanosecond count. The representation limits the largest representable duration to approximately 290 years. A numeric type represents sets of integer or floating-point values. The predeclared architecture-independent numeric types are The value of an n-bit integer is n bits wide and represented using two's complement arithmetic. Conversions are required when different numeric types are mixed in an expression or assignment. A string type represents the set of string values. A string value is a (possibly empty) sequence of bytes. The case insensitive keyword for the string type is 'string'. The length of a string (its size in bytes) can be discovered using the built-in function len. A time type represents an instant in time with nanosecond precision. Each time has associated with it a location, consulted when computing the presentation form of the time. The following functions are implicitly declared An expression specifies the computation of a value by applying operators and functions to operands. Operands denote the elementary values in an expression. An operand may be a literal, a (possibly qualified) identifier denoting a constant or a function or a table/record set column, or a parenthesized expression. A qualified identifier is an identifier qualified with a table/record set name prefix. For example Primary expression are the operands for unary and binary expressions. For example A primary expression of the form denotes the element of a string indexed by x. Its type is byte. The value x is called the index. The following rules apply - The index x must be of integer type except bigint or duration; it is in range if 0 <= x < len(s), otherwise it is out of range. - A constant index must be non-negative and representable by a value of type int. - A constant index must be in range if the string a is a literal. - If x is out of range at run time, a run-time error occurs. - s[x] is the byte at index x and the type of s[x] is byte. If s is NULL or x is NULL then the result is NULL. Otherwise s[x] is illegal. For a string, the primary expression constructs a substring. The indices low and high select which elements appear in the result. The result has indices starting at 0 and length equal to high - low. For convenience, any of the indices may be omitted. A missing low index defaults to zero; a missing high index defaults to the length of the sliced operand The indices low and high are in range if 0 <= low <= high <= len(a), otherwise they are out of range. A constant index must be non-negative and representable by a value of type int. If both indices are constant, they must satisfy low <= high. If the indices are out of range at run time, a run-time error occurs. Integer values of type bigint or duration cannot be used as indices. If s is NULL the result is NULL. If low or high is not omitted and is NULL then the result is NULL. Given an identifier f denoting a predeclared function, calls f with arguments a1, a2, … an. Arguments are evaluated before the function is called. The type of the expression is the result type of f. In a function call, the function value and arguments are evaluated in the usual order. After they are evaluated, the parameters of the call are passed by value to the function and the called function begins execution. The return value of the function is passed by value when the function returns. Calling an undefined function causes a compile-time error. Operators combine operands into expressions. Comparisons are discussed elsewhere. For other binary operators, the operand types must be identical unless the operation involves shifts or untyped constants. For operations involving constants only, see the section on constant expressions. Except for shift operations, if one operand is an untyped constant and the other operand is not, the constant is converted to the type of the other operand. The right operand in a shift expression must have unsigned integer type or be an untyped constant that can be converted to unsigned integer type. If the left operand of a non-constant shift expression is an untyped constant, the type of the constant is what it would be if the shift expression were replaced by its left operand alone. Expressions of the form yield a boolean value true if expr2, a regular expression, matches expr1 (see also [6]). Both expression must be of type string. If any one of the expressions is NULL the result is NULL. Predicates are special form expressions having a boolean result type. Expressions of the form are equivalent, including NULL handling, to The types of involved expressions must be comparable as defined in "Comparison operators". Another form of the IN predicate creates the expression list from a result of a SelectStmt. The SelectStmt must select only one column. The produced expression list is resource limited by the memory available to the process. NULL values produced by the SelectStmt are ignored, but if all records of the SelectStmt are NULL the predicate yields NULL. The select statement is evaluated only once. If the type of expr is not the same as the type of the field returned by the SelectStmt then the set operation yields false. The type of the column returned by the SelectStmt must be one of the simple (non blob-like) types: Expressions of the form are equivalent, including NULL handling, to The types of involved expressions must be ordered as defined in "Comparison operators". Expressions of the form yield a boolean value true if expr does not have a specific type (case A) or if expr has a specific type (case B). In other cases the result is a boolean value false. Unary operators have the highest precedence. There are five precedence levels for binary operators. Multiplication operators bind strongest, followed by addition operators, comparison operators, && (logical AND), and finally || (logical OR) Binary operators of the same precedence associate from left to right. For instance, x / y * z is the same as (x / y) * z. Note that the operator precedence is reflected explicitly by the grammar. Arithmetic operators apply to numeric values and yield a result of the same type as the first operand. The four standard arithmetic operators (+, -, *, /) apply to integer, rational, floating-point, and complex types; + also applies to strings; +,- also applies to times. All other arithmetic operators apply to integers only. sum integers, rationals, floats, complex values, strings difference integers, rationals, floats, complex values, times product integers, rationals, floats, complex values / quotient integers, rationals, floats, complex values % remainder integers & bitwise AND integers | bitwise OR integers ^ bitwise XOR integers &^ bit clear (AND NOT) integers << left shift integer << unsigned integer >> right shift integer >> unsigned integer Strings can be concatenated using the + operator String addition creates a new string by concatenating the operands. A value of type duration can be added to or subtracted from a value of type time. Times can subtracted from each other producing a value of type duration. For two integer values x and y, the integer quotient q = x / y and remainder r = x % y satisfy the following relationships with x / y truncated towards zero ("truncated division"). As an exception to this rule, if the dividend x is the most negative value for the int type of x, the quotient q = x / -1 is equal to x (and r = 0). If the divisor is a constant expression, it must not be zero. If the divisor is zero at run time, a run-time error occurs. If the dividend is non-negative and the divisor is a constant power of 2, the division may be replaced by a right shift, and computing the remainder may be replaced by a bitwise AND operation The shift operators shift the left operand by the shift count specified by the right operand. They implement arithmetic shifts if the left operand is a signed integer and logical shifts if it is an unsigned integer. There is no upper limit on the shift count. Shifts behave as if the left operand is shifted n times by 1 for a shift count of n. As a result, x << 1 is the same as x*2 and x >> 1 is the same as x/2 but truncated towards negative infinity. For integer operands, the unary operators +, -, and ^ are defined as follows For floating-point and complex numbers, +x is the same as x, while -x is the negation of x. The result of a floating-point or complex division by zero is not specified beyond the IEEE-754 standard; whether a run-time error occurs is implementation-specific. Whenever any operand of any arithmetic operation, unary or binary, is NULL, as well as in the case of the string concatenating operation, the result is NULL. For unsigned integer values, the operations +, -, *, and << are computed modulo 2n, where n is the bit width of the unsigned integer's type. Loosely speaking, these unsigned integer operations discard high bits upon overflow, and expressions may rely on “wrap around”. For signed integers with a finite bit width, the operations +, -, *, and << may legally overflow and the resulting value exists and is deterministically defined by the signed integer representation, the operation, and its operands. No exception is raised as a result of overflow. An evaluator may not optimize an expression under the assumption that overflow does not occur. For instance, it may not assume that x < x + 1 is always true. Integers of type bigint and rationals do not overflow but their handling is limited by the memory resources available to the program. Comparison operators compare two operands and yield a boolean value. In any comparison, the first operand must be of same type as is the second operand, or vice versa. The equality operators == and != apply to operands that are comparable. The ordering operators <, <=, >, and >= apply to operands that are ordered. These terms and the result of the comparisons are defined as follows - Boolean values are comparable. Two boolean values are equal if they are either both true or both false. - Complex values are comparable. Two complex values u and v are equal if both real(u) == real(v) and imag(u) == imag(v). - Integer values are comparable and ordered, in the usual way. Note that durations are integers. - Floating point values are comparable and ordered, as defined by the IEEE-754 standard. - Rational values are comparable and ordered, in the usual way. - String values are comparable and ordered, lexically byte-wise. - Time values are comparable and ordered. Whenever any operand of any comparison operation is NULL, the result is NULL. Note that slices are always of type string. Logical operators apply to boolean values and yield a boolean result. The right operand is evaluated conditionally. The truth tables for logical operations with NULL values Conversions are expressions of the form T(x) where T is a type and x is an expression that can be converted to type T. A constant value x can be converted to type T in any of these cases: - x is representable by a value of type T. - x is a floating-point constant, T is a floating-point type, and x is representable by a value of type T after rounding using IEEE 754 round-to-even rules. The constant T(x) is the rounded value. - x is an integer constant and T is a string type. The same rule as for non-constant x applies in this case. Converting a constant yields a typed constant as result. A non-constant value x can be converted to type T in any of these cases: - x has type T. - x's type and T are both integer or floating point types. - x's type and T are both complex types. - x is an integer, except bigint or duration, and T is a string type. Specific rules apply to (non-constant) conversions between numeric types or to and from a string type. These conversions may change the representation of x and incur a run-time cost. All other conversions only change the type but not the representation of x. A conversion of NULL to any type yields NULL. For the conversion of non-constant numeric values, the following rules apply 1. When converting between integer types, if the value is a signed integer, it is sign extended to implicit infinite precision; otherwise it is zero extended. It is then truncated to fit in the result type's size. For example, if v == uint16(0x10F0), then uint32(int8(v)) == 0xFFFFFFF0. The conversion always yields a valid value; there is no indication of overflow. 2. When converting a floating-point number to an integer, the fraction is discarded (truncation towards zero). 3. When converting an integer or floating-point number to a floating-point type, or a complex number to another complex type, the result value is rounded to the precision specified by the destination type. For instance, the value of a variable x of type float32 may be stored using additional precision beyond that of an IEEE-754 32-bit number, but float32(x) represents the result of rounding x's value to 32-bit precision. Similarly, x + 0.1 may use more than 32 bits of precision, but float32(x + 0.1) does not. In all non-constant conversions involving floating-point or complex values, if the result type cannot represent the value the conversion succeeds but the result value is implementation-dependent. 1. Converting a signed or unsigned integer value to a string type yields a string containing the UTF-8 representation of the integer. Values outside the range of valid Unicode code points are converted to "\uFFFD". 2. Converting a blob to a string type yields a string whose successive bytes are the elements of the blob. 3. Converting a value of a string type to a blob yields a blob whose successive elements are the bytes of the string. 4. Converting a value of a bigint type to a string yields a string containing the decimal decimal representation of the integer. 5. Converting a value of a string type to a bigint yields a bigint value containing the integer represented by the string value. A prefix of “0x” or “0X” selects base 16; the “0” prefix selects base 8, and a “0b” or “0B” prefix selects base 2. Otherwise the value is interpreted in base 10. An error occurs if the string value is not in any valid format. 6. Converting a value of a rational type to a string yields a string containing the decimal decimal representation of the rational in the form "a/b" (even if b == 1). 7. Converting a value of a string type to a bigrat yields a bigrat value containing the rational represented by the string value. The string can be given as a fraction "a/b" or as a floating-point number optionally followed by an exponent. An error occurs if the string value is not in any valid format. 8. Converting a value of a duration type to a string returns a string representing the duration in the form "72h3m0.5s". Leading zero units are omitted. As a special case, durations less than one second format using a smaller unit (milli-, micro-, or nanoseconds) to ensure that the leading digit is non-zero. The zero duration formats as 0, with no unit. 9. Converting a string value to a duration yields a duration represented by the string. A duration string is a possibly signed sequence of decimal numbers, each with optional fraction and a unit suffix, such as "300ms", "-1.5h" or "2h45m". Valid time units are "ns", "us" (or "µs"), "ms", "s", "m", "h". 10. Converting a time value to a string returns the time formatted using the format string When evaluating the operands of an expression or of function calls, operations are evaluated in lexical left-to-right order. For example, in the evaluation of the function calls and evaluation of c happen in the order h(), i(), j(), c. Floating-point operations within a single expression are evaluated according to the associativity of the operators. Explicit parentheses affect the evaluation by overriding the default associativity. In the expression x + (y + z) the addition y + z is performed before adding x. Statements control execution. The empty statement does nothing. Alter table statements modify existing tables. With the ADD clause it adds a new column to the table. The column must not exist. With the DROP clause it removes an existing column from a table. The column must exist and it must be not the only (last) column of the table. IOW, there cannot be a table with no columns. For example When adding a column to a table with existing data, the constraint clause of the ColumnDef cannot be used. Adding a constrained column to an empty table is fine. Begin transactions statements introduce a new transaction level. Every transaction level must be eventually balanced by exactly one of COMMIT or ROLLBACK statements. Note that when a transaction is roll-backed because of a statement failure then no explicit balancing of the respective BEGIN TRANSACTION is statement is required nor permitted. Failure to properly balance any opened transaction level may cause dead locks and/or lose of data updated in the uppermost opened but never properly closed transaction level. For example A database cannot be updated (mutated) outside of a transaction. Statements requiring a transaction A database is effectively read only outside of a transaction. Statements not requiring a transaction The commit statement closes the innermost transaction nesting level. If that's the outermost level then the updates to the DB made by the transaction are atomically made persistent. For example Create index statements create new indices. Index is a named projection of ordered values of a table column to the respective records. As a special case the id() of the record can be indexed. Index name must not be the same as any of the existing tables and it also cannot be the same as of any column name of the table the index is on. For example Now certain SELECT statements may use the indices to speed up joins and/or to speed up record set filtering when the WHERE clause is used; or the indices might be used to improve the performance when the ORDER BY clause is present. The UNIQUE modifier requires the indexed values tuple to be index-wise unique or have all values NULL. The optional IF NOT EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the index already exists. A simple index consists of only one expression which must be either a column name or the built-in id(). A more complex and more general index is one that consists of more than one expression or its single expression does not qualify as a simple index. In this case the type of all expressions in the list must be one of the non blob-like types. Note: Blob-like types are blob, bigint, bigrat, time and duration. Create table statements create new tables. A column definition declares the column name and type. Table names and column names are case sensitive. Neither a table or an index of the same name may exist in the DB. For example The optional IF NOT EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the table already exists. The optional constraint clause has two forms. The first one is found in many SQL dialects. This form prevents the data in column DepartmentName to be NULL. The second form allows an arbitrary boolean expression to be used to validate the column. If the value of the expression is true then the validation succeeded. If the value of the expression is false or NULL then the validation fails. If the value of the expression is not of type bool an error occurs. The optional DEFAULT clause is an expression which, if present, is substituted instead of a NULL value when the colum is assigned a value. Note that the constraint and/or default expressions may refer to other columns by name: When a table row is inserted by the INSERT INTO statement or when a table row is updated by the UPDATE statement, the order of operations is as follows: 1. The new values of the affected columns are set and the values of all the row columns become the named values which can be referred to in default expressions evaluated in step 2. 2. If any row column value is NULL and the DEFAULT clause is present in the column's definition, the default expression is evaluated and its value is set as the respective column value. 3. The values, potentially updated, of row columns become the named values which can be referred to in constraint expressions evaluated during step 4. 4. All row columns which definition has the constraint clause present will have that constraint checked. If any constraint violation is detected, the overall operation fails and no changes to the table are made. Delete from statements remove rows from a table, which must exist. For example If the WHERE clause is not present then all rows are removed and the statement is equivalent to the TRUNCATE TABLE statement. Drop index statements remove indices from the DB. The index must exist. For example The optional IF EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the index does not exist. Drop table statements remove tables from the DB. The table must exist. For example The optional IF EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the table does not exist. Insert into statements insert new rows into tables. New rows come from literal data, if using the VALUES clause, or are a result of select statement. In the later case the select statement is fully evaluated before the insertion of any rows is performed, allowing to insert values calculated from the same table rows are to be inserted into. If the ColumnNameList part is omitted then the number of values inserted in the row must be the same as are columns in the table. If the ColumnNameList part is present then the number of values per row must be same as the same number of column names. All other columns of the record are set to NULL. The type of the value assigned to a column must be the same as is the column's type or the value must be NULL. For example If any of the columns of the table were defined using the optional constraints clause or the optional defaults clause then those are processed on a per row basis. The details are discussed in the "Constraints and defaults" chapter below the CREATE TABLE statement documentation. Explain statement produces a recordset consisting of lines of text which describe the execution plan of a statement, if any. For example, the QL tool treats the explain statement specially and outputs the joined lines: The explanation may aid in uderstanding how a statement/query would be executed and if indices are used as expected - or which indices may possibly improve the statement performance. The create index statements above were directly copy/pasted in the terminal from the suggestions provided by the filter recordset pipeline part returned by the explain statement. If the statement has nothing special in its plan, the result is the original statement. To get an explanation of the select statement of the IN predicate, use the EXPLAIN statement with that particular select statement. The rollback statement closes the innermost transaction nesting level discarding any updates to the DB made by it. If that's the outermost level then the effects on the DB are as if the transaction never happened. For example The (temporary) record set from the last statement is returned and can be processed by the client. In this case the rollback is the same as 'DROP TABLE tmp;' but it can be a more complex operation. Select from statements produce recordsets. The optional DISTINCT modifier ensures all rows in the result recordset are unique. Either all of the resulting fields are returned ('*') or only those named in FieldList. RecordSetList is a list of table names or parenthesized select statements, optionally (re)named using the AS clause. The result can be filtered using a WhereClause and orderd by the OrderBy clause. For example If Recordset is a nested, parenthesized SelectStmt then it must be given a name using the AS clause if its field are to be accessible in expressions. A field is an named expression. Identifiers, not used as a type in conversion or a function name in the Call clause, denote names of (other) fields, values of which should be used in the expression. The expression can be named using the AS clause. If the AS clause is not present and the expression consists solely of a field name, then that field name is used as the name of the resulting field. Otherwise the field is unnamed. For example The SELECT statement can optionally enumerate the desired/resulting fields in a list. No two identical field names can appear in the list. When more than one record set is used in the FROM clause record set list, the result record set field names are rewritten to be qualified using the record set names. If a particular record set doesn't have a name, its respective fields became unnamed. The optional JOIN clause, for example is mostly equal to except that the rows from a which, when they appear in the cross join, never made expr to evaluate to true, are combined with a virtual row from b, containing all nulls, and added to the result set. For the RIGHT JOIN variant the discussed rules are used for rows from b not satisfying expr == true and the virtual, all-null row "comes" from a. The FULL JOIN adds the respective rows which would be otherwise provided by the separate executions of the LEFT JOIN and RIGHT JOIN variants. For more thorough OUTER JOIN discussion please see the Wikipedia article at [10]. Resultins rows of a SELECT statement can be optionally ordered by the ORDER BY clause. Collating proceeds by considering the expressions in the expression list left to right until a collating order is determined. Any possibly remaining expressions are not evaluated. All of the expression values must yield an ordered type or NULL. Ordered types are defined in "Comparison operators". Collating of elements having a NULL value is different compared to what the comparison operators yield in expression evaluation (NULL result instead of a boolean value). Below, T denotes a non NULL value of any QL type. NULL collates before any non NULL value (is considered smaller than T). Two NULLs have no collating order (are considered equal). The WHERE clause restricts records considered by some statements, like SELECT FROM, DELETE FROM, or UPDATE. It is an error if the expression evaluates to a non null value of non bool type. The GROUP BY clause is used to project rows having common values into a smaller set of rows. For example Using the GROUP BY without any aggregate functions in the selected fields is in certain cases equal to using the DISTINCT modifier. The last two examples above produce the same resultsets. The optional OFFSET clause allows to ignore first N records. For example The above will produce only rows 11, 12, ... of the record set, if they exist. The value of the expression must a non negative integer, but not bigint or duration. The optional LIMIT clause allows to ignore all but first N records. For example The above will return at most the first 10 records of the record set. The value of the expression must a non negative integer, but not bigint or duration. The LIMIT and OFFSET clauses can be combined. For example Considering table t has, say 10 records, the above will produce only records 4 - 8. After returning record #8, no more result rows/records are computed. 1. The FROM clause is evaluated, producing a Cartesian product of its source record sets (tables or nested SELECT statements). 2. If present, the JOIN cluase is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation and the recordset specified by the JOIN clause. (... JOIN Recordset ON ...) 3. If present, the WHERE clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation. 4. If present, the GROUP BY clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 5. The SELECT field expressions are evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 6. If present, the DISTINCT modifier is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 7. If present, the ORDER BY clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 8. If present, the OFFSET clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). The offset expression is evaluated once for the first record produced by the previous evaluations. 9. If present, the LIMIT clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). The limit expression is evaluated once for the first record produced by the previous evaluations. Truncate table statements remove all records from a table. The table must exist. For example Update statements change values of fields in rows of a table. For example Note: The SET clause is optional. If any of the columns of the table were defined using the optional constraints clause or the optional defaults clause then those are processed on a per row basis. The details are discussed in the "Constraints and defaults" chapter below the CREATE TABLE statement documentation. To allow to query for DB meta data, there exist specially named tables, some of them being virtual. Note: Virtual system tables may have fake table-wise unique but meaningless and unstable record IDs. Do not apply the built-in id() to any system table. The table __Table lists all tables in the DB. The schema is The Schema column returns the statement to (re)create table Name. This table is virtual. The table __Colum lists all columns of all tables in the DB. The schema is The Ordinal column defines the 1-based index of the column in the record. This table is virtual. The table __Colum2 lists all columns of all tables in the DB which have the constraint NOT NULL or which have a constraint expression defined or which have a default expression defined. The schema is It's possible to obtain a consolidated recordset for all properties of all DB columns using The Name column is the column name in TableName. The table __Index lists all indices in the DB. The schema is The IsUnique columns reflects if the index was created using the optional UNIQUE clause. This table is virtual. Built-in functions are predeclared. The built-in aggregate function avg returns the average of values of an expression. Avg ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if avg is applied to an empty record set. The column values must be of a numeric type. The built-in function contains returns true if substr is within s. If any argument to contains is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in aggregate function count returns how many times an expression has a non NULL values or the number of rows in a record set. Note: count() returns 0 for an empty record set. For example Date returns the time corresponding to in the appropriate zone for that time in the given location. The month, day, hour, min, sec, and nsec values may be outside their usual ranges and will be normalized during the conversion. For example, October 32 converts to November 1. A daylight savings time transition skips or repeats times. For example, in the United States, March 13, 2011 2:15am never occurred, while November 6, 2011 1:15am occurred twice. In such cases, the choice of time zone, and therefore the time, is not well-defined. Date returns a time that is correct in one of the two zones involved in the transition, but it does not guarantee which. A location maps time instants to the zone in use at that time. Typically, the location represents the collection of time offsets in use in a geographical area, such as "CEST" and "CET" for central Europe. "local" represents the system's local time zone. "UTC" represents Universal Coordinated Time (UTC). The month specifies a month of the year (January = 1, ...). If any argument to date is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function day returns the day of the month specified by t. If the argument to day is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function formatTime returns a textual representation of the time value formatted according to layout, which defines the format by showing how the reference time, would be displayed if it were the value; it serves as an example of the desired output. The same display rules will then be applied to the time value. If any argument to formatTime is NULL the result is NULL. NOTE: The string value of the time zone, like "CET" or "ACDT", is dependent on the time zone of the machine the function is run on. For example, if the t value is in "CET", but the machine is in "ACDT", instead of "CET" the result is "+0100". This is the same what Go (time.Time).String() returns and in fact formatTime directly calls t.String(). returns on a machine in the CET time zone, but may return on a machine in the ACDT zone. The time value is in both cases the same so its ordering and comparing is correct. Only the display value can differ. The built-in functions formatFloat and formatInt format numbers to strings using go's number format functions in the `strconv` package. For all three functions, only the first argument is mandatory. The default values of the rest are shown in the examples. If the first argument is NULL, the result is NULL. returns returns returns Unlike the `strconv` equivalent, the formatInt function handles all integer types, both signed and unsigned. The built-in function hasPrefix tests whether the string s begins with prefix. If any argument to hasPrefix is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function hasSuffix tests whether the string s ends with suffix. If any argument to hasSuffix is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function hour returns the hour within the day specified by t, in the range [0, 23]. If the argument to hour is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function hours returns the duration as a floating point number of hours. If the argument to hours is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function id takes zero or one arguments. If no argument is provided, id() returns a table-unique automatically assigned numeric identifier of type int. Ids of deleted records are not reused unless the DB becomes completely empty (has no tables). For example If id() without arguments is called for a row which is not a table record then the result value is NULL. For example If id() has one argument it must be a table name of a table in a cross join. For example The built-in function len takes a string argument and returns the lentgh of the string in bytes. The expression len(s) is constant if s is a string constant. If the argument to len is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in aggregate function max returns the largest value of an expression in a record set. Max ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if max is applied to an empty record set. The expression values must be of an ordered type. For example The built-in aggregate function min returns the smallest value of an expression in a record set. Min ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if min is applied to an empty record set. For example The column values must be of an ordered type. The built-in function minute returns the minute offset within the hour specified by t, in the range [0, 59]. If the argument to minute is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function minutes returns the duration as a floating point number of minutes. If the argument to minutes is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function month returns the month of the year specified by t (January = 1, ...). If the argument to month is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function nanosecond returns the nanosecond offset within the second specified by t, in the range [0, 999999999]. If the argument to nanosecond is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function nanoseconds returns the duration as an integer nanosecond count. If the argument to nanoseconds is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function now returns the current local time. The built-in function parseTime parses a formatted string and returns the time value it represents. The layout defines the format by showing how the reference time, would be interpreted if it were the value; it serves as an example of the input format. The same interpretation will then be made to the input string. Elements omitted from the value are assumed to be zero or, when zero is impossible, one, so parsing "3:04pm" returns the time corresponding to Jan 1, year 0, 15:04:00 UTC (note that because the year is 0, this time is before the zero Time). Years must be in the range 0000..9999. The day of the week is checked for syntax but it is otherwise ignored. In the absence of a time zone indicator, parseTime returns a time in UTC. When parsing a time with a zone offset like -0700, if the offset corresponds to a time zone used by the current location, then parseTime uses that location and zone in the returned time. Otherwise it records the time as being in a fabricated location with time fixed at the given zone offset. When parsing a time with a zone abbreviation like MST, if the zone abbreviation has a defined offset in the current location, then that offset is used. The zone abbreviation "UTC" is recognized as UTC regardless of location. If the zone abbreviation is unknown, Parse records the time as being in a fabricated location with the given zone abbreviation and a zero offset. This choice means that such a time can be parses and reformatted with the same layout losslessly, but the exact instant used in the representation will differ by the actual zone offset. To avoid such problems, prefer time layouts that use a numeric zone offset. If any argument to parseTime is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function second returns the second offset within the minute specified by t, in the range [0, 59]. If the argument to second is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function seconds returns the duration as a floating point number of seconds. If the argument to seconds is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function since returns the time elapsed since t. It is shorthand for now()-t. If the argument to since is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in aggregate function sum returns the sum of values of an expression for all rows of a record set. Sum ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if sum is applied to an empty record set. The column values must be of a numeric type. The built-in function timeIn returns t with the location information set to loc. For discussion of the loc argument please see date(). If any argument to timeIn is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function weekday returns the day of the week specified by t. Sunday == 0, Monday == 1, ... If the argument to weekday is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function year returns the year in which t occurs. If the argument to year is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function yearDay returns the day of the year specified by t, in the range [1,365] for non-leap years, and [1,366] in leap years. If the argument to yearDay is NULL the result is NULL. Three functions assemble and disassemble complex numbers. The built-in function complex constructs a complex value from a floating-point real and imaginary part, while real and imag extract the real and imaginary parts of a complex value. The type of the arguments and return value correspond. For complex, the two arguments must be of the same floating-point type and the return type is the complex type with the corresponding floating-point constituents: complex64 for float32, complex128 for float64. The real and imag functions together form the inverse, so for a complex value z, z == complex(real(z), imag(z)). If the operands of these functions are all constants, the return value is a constant. If any argument to any of complex, real, imag functions is NULL the result is NULL. For the numeric types, the following sizes are guaranteed Portions of this specification page are modifications based on work[2] created and shared by Google[3] and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License[4]. This specification is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, and code is licensed under a BSD license[5]. Links from the above documentation This section is not part of the specification. WARNING: The implementation of indices is new and it surely needs more time to become mature. Indices are used currently used only by the WHERE clause. The following expression patterns of 'WHERE expression' are recognized and trigger index use. The relOp is one of the relation operators <, <=, ==, >=, >. For the equality operator both operands must be of comparable types. For all other operators both operands must be of ordered types. The constant expression is a compile time constant expression. Some constant folding is still a TODO. Parameter is a QL parameter ($1 etc.). Consider tables t and u, both with an indexed field f. The WHERE expression doesn't comply with the above simple detected cases. However, such query is now automatically rewritten to which will use both of the indices. The impact of using the indices can be substantial (cf. BenchmarkCrossJoin*) if the resulting rows have low "selectivity", ie. only few rows from both tables are selected by the respective WHERE filtering. Note: Existing QL DBs can be used and indices can be added to them. However, once any indices are present in the DB, the old QL versions cannot work with such DB anymore. Running a benchmark with -v (-test.v) outputs information about the scale used to report records/s and a brief description of the benchmark. For example Running the full suite of benchmarks takes a lot of time. Use the -timeout flag to avoid them being killed after the default time limit (10 minutes).
Package ql implements a pure Go embedded SQL database engine. QL is a member of the SQL family of languages. It is less complex and less powerful than SQL (whichever specification SQL is considered to be). 2017-01-10: Release v1.1.0 fixes some bugs and adds a configurable WAL headroom. 2016-07-29: Release v1.0.6 enables alternatively using = instead of == for equality operation. 2016-07-11: Release v1.0.5 undoes vendoring of lldb. QL now uses stable lldb (github.com/cznic/lldb). 2016-07-06: Release v1.0.4 fixes a panic when closing the WAL file. 2016-04-03: Release v1.0.3 fixes a data race. 2016-03-23: Release v1.0.2 vendors github.com/cznic/exp/lldb and github.com/camlistore/go4/lock. 2016-03-17: Release v1.0.1 adjusts for latest goyacc. Parser error messages are improved and changed, but their exact form is not considered a API change. 2016-03-05: The current version has been tagged v1.0.0. 2015-06-15: To improve compatibility with other SQL implementations, the count built-in aggregate function now accepts * as its argument. 2015-05-29: The execution planner was rewritten from scratch. It should use indices in all places where they were used before plus in some additional situations. It is possible to investigate the plan using the newly added EXPLAIN statement. The QL tool is handy for such analysis. If the planner would have used an index, but no such exists, the plan includes hints in form of copy/paste ready CREATE INDEX statements. The planner is still quite simple and a lot of work on it is yet ahead. You can help this process by filling an issue with a schema and query which fails to use an index or indices when it should, in your opinion. Bonus points for including output of `ql 'explain <query>'`. 2015-05-09: The grammar of the CREATE INDEX statement now accepts an expression list instead of a single expression, which was further limited to just a column name or the built-in id(). As a side effect, composite indices are now functional. However, the values in the expression-list style index are not yet used by other statements or the statement/query planner. The composite index is useful while having UNIQUE clause to check for semantically duplicate rows before they get added to the table or when such a row is mutated using the UPDATE statement and the expression-list style index tuple of the row is thus recomputed. 2015-05-02: The Schema field of table __Table now correctly reflects any column constraints and/or defaults. Also, the (*DB).Info method now has that information provided in new ColumInfo fields NotNull, Constraint and Default. 2015-04-20: Added support for {LEFT,RIGHT,FULL} [OUTER] JOIN. 2015-04-18: Column definitions can now have constraints and defaults. Details are discussed in the "Constraints and defaults" chapter below the CREATE TABLE statement documentation. 2015-03-06: New built-in functions formatFloat and formatInt. Thanks urandom! (https://github.com/urandom) 2015-02-16: IN predicate now accepts a SELECT statement. See the updated "Predicates" section. 2015-01-17: Logical operators || and && have now alternative spellings: OR and AND (case insensitive). AND was a keyword before, but OR is a new one. This can possibly break existing queries. For the record, it's a good idea to not use any name appearing in, for example, [7] in your queries as the list of QL's keywords may expand for gaining better compatibility with existing SQL "standards". 2015-01-12: ACID guarantees were tightened at the cost of performance in some cases. The write collecting window mechanism, a formerly used implementation detail, was removed. Inserting rows one by one in a transaction is now slow. I mean very slow. Try to avoid inserting single rows in a transaction. Instead, whenever possible, perform batch updates of tens to, say thousands of rows in a single transaction. See also: http://www.sqlite.org/faq.html#q19, the discussed synchronization principles involved are the same as for QL, modulo minor details. Note: A side effect is that closing a DB before exiting an application, both for the Go API and through database/sql driver, is no more required, strictly speaking. Beware that exiting an application while there is an open (uncommitted) transaction in progress means losing the transaction data. However, the DB will not become corrupted because of not closing it. Nor that was the case before, but formerly failing to close a DB could have resulted in losing the data of the last transaction. 2014-09-21: id() now optionally accepts a single argument - a table name. 2014-09-01: Added the DB.Flush() method and the LIKE pattern matching predicate. 2014-08-08: The built in functions max and min now accept also time values. Thanks opennota! (https://github.com/opennota) 2014-06-05: RecordSet interface extended by new methods FirstRow and Rows. 2014-06-02: Indices on id() are now used by SELECT statements. 2014-05-07: Introduction of Marshal, Schema, Unmarshal. 2014-04-15: Added optional IF NOT EXISTS clause to CREATE INDEX and optional IF EXISTS clause to DROP INDEX. 2014-04-12: The column Unique in the virtual table __Index was renamed to IsUnique because the old name is a keyword. Unfortunately, this is a breaking change, sorry. 2014-04-11: Introduction of LIMIT, OFFSET. 2014-04-10: Introduction of query rewriting. 2014-04-07: Introduction of indices. QL imports zappy[8], a block-based compressor, which speeds up its performance by using a C version of the compression/decompression algorithms. If a CGO-free (pure Go) version of QL, or an app using QL, is required, please include 'purego' in the -tags option of go {build,get,install}. For example: If zappy was installed before installing QL, it might be necessary to rebuild zappy first (or rebuild QL with all its dependencies using the -a option): The syntax is specified using Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF) Lower-case production names are used to identify lexical tokens. Non-terminals are in CamelCase. Lexical tokens are enclosed in double quotes "" or back quotes “. The form a … b represents the set of characters from a through b as alternatives. The horizontal ellipsis … is also used elsewhere in the spec to informally denote various enumerations or code snippets that are not further specified. QL source code is Unicode text encoded in UTF-8. The text is not canonicalized, so a single accented code point is distinct from the same character constructed from combining an accent and a letter; those are treated as two code points. For simplicity, this document will use the unqualified term character to refer to a Unicode code point in the source text. Each code point is distinct; for instance, upper and lower case letters are different characters. Implementation restriction: For compatibility with other tools, the parser may disallow the NUL character (U+0000) in the statement. Implementation restriction: A byte order mark is disallowed anywhere in QL statements. The following terms are used to denote specific character classes The underscore character _ (U+005F) is considered a letter. Lexical elements are comments, tokens, identifiers, keywords, operators and delimiters, integer, floating-point, imaginary, rune and string literals and QL parameters. Line comments start with the character sequence // or -- and stop at the end of the line. A line comment acts like a space. General comments start with the character sequence /* and continue through the character sequence */. A general comment acts like a space. Comments do not nest. Tokens form the vocabulary of QL. There are four classes: identifiers, keywords, operators and delimiters, and literals. White space, formed from spaces (U+0020), horizontal tabs (U+0009), carriage returns (U+000D), and newlines (U+000A), is ignored except as it separates tokens that would otherwise combine into a single token. The formal grammar uses semicolons ";" as separators of QL statements. A single QL statement or the last QL statement in a list of statements can have an optional semicolon terminator. (Actually a separator from the following empty statement.) Identifiers name entities such as tables or record set columns. An identifier is a sequence of one or more letters and digits. The first character in an identifier must be a letter. For example No identifiers are predeclared, however note that no keyword can be used as an identifier. Identifiers starting with two underscores are used for meta data virtual tables names. For forward compatibility, users should generally avoid using any identifiers starting with two underscores. For example The following keywords are reserved and may not be used as identifiers. Keywords are not case sensitive. The following character sequences represent operators, delimiters, and other special tokens Operators consisting of more than one character are referred to by names in the rest of the documentation An integer literal is a sequence of digits representing an integer constant. An optional prefix sets a non-decimal base: 0 for octal, 0x or 0X for hexadecimal. In hexadecimal literals, letters a-f and A-F represent values 10 through 15. For example A floating-point literal is a decimal representation of a floating-point constant. It has an integer part, a decimal point, a fractional part, and an exponent part. The integer and fractional part comprise decimal digits; the exponent part is an e or E followed by an optionally signed decimal exponent. One of the integer part or the fractional part may be elided; one of the decimal point or the exponent may be elided. For example An imaginary literal is a decimal representation of the imaginary part of a complex constant. It consists of a floating-point literal or decimal integer followed by the lower-case letter i. For example A rune literal represents a rune constant, an integer value identifying a Unicode code point. A rune literal is expressed as one or more characters enclosed in single quotes. Within the quotes, any character may appear except single quote and newline. A single quoted character represents the Unicode value of the character itself, while multi-character sequences beginning with a backslash encode values in various formats. The simplest form represents the single character within the quotes; since QL statements are Unicode characters encoded in UTF-8, multiple UTF-8-encoded bytes may represent a single integer value. For instance, the literal 'a' holds a single byte representing a literal a, Unicode U+0061, value 0x61, while 'ä' holds two bytes (0xc3 0xa4) representing a literal a-dieresis, U+00E4, value 0xe4. Several backslash escapes allow arbitrary values to be encoded as ASCII text. There are four ways to represent the integer value as a numeric constant: \x followed by exactly two hexadecimal digits; \u followed by exactly four hexadecimal digits; \U followed by exactly eight hexadecimal digits, and a plain backslash \ followed by exactly three octal digits. In each case the value of the literal is the value represented by the digits in the corresponding base. Although these representations all result in an integer, they have different valid ranges. Octal escapes must represent a value between 0 and 255 inclusive. Hexadecimal escapes satisfy this condition by construction. The escapes \u and \U represent Unicode code points so within them some values are illegal, in particular those above 0x10FFFF and surrogate halves. After a backslash, certain single-character escapes represent special values All other sequences starting with a backslash are illegal inside rune literals. For example A string literal represents a string constant obtained from concatenating a sequence of characters. There are two forms: raw string literals and interpreted string literals. Raw string literals are character sequences between back quotes “. Within the quotes, any character is legal except back quote. The value of a raw string literal is the string composed of the uninterpreted (implicitly UTF-8-encoded) characters between the quotes; in particular, backslashes have no special meaning and the string may contain newlines. Carriage returns inside raw string literals are discarded from the raw string value. Interpreted string literals are character sequences between double quotes "". The text between the quotes, which may not contain newlines, forms the value of the literal, with backslash escapes interpreted as they are in rune literals (except that \' is illegal and \" is legal), with the same restrictions. The three-digit octal (\nnn) and two-digit hexadecimal (\xnn) escapes represent individual bytes of the resulting string; all other escapes represent the (possibly multi-byte) UTF-8 encoding of individual characters. Thus inside a string literal \377 and \xFF represent a single byte of value 0xFF=255, while ÿ, \u00FF, \U000000FF and \xc3\xbf represent the two bytes 0xc3 0xbf of the UTF-8 encoding of character U+00FF. For example These examples all represent the same string If the statement source represents a character as two code points, such as a combining form involving an accent and a letter, the result will be an error if placed in a rune literal (it is not a single code point), and will appear as two code points if placed in a string literal. Literals are assigned their values from the respective text representation at "compile" (parse) time. QL parameters provide the same functionality as literals, but their value is assigned at execution time from an expression list passed to DB.Run or DB.Execute. Using '?' or '$' is completely equivalent. For example Keywords 'false' and 'true' (not case sensitive) represent the two possible constant values of type bool (also not case sensitive). Keyword 'NULL' (not case sensitive) represents an untyped constant which is assignable to any type. NULL is distinct from any other value of any type. A type determines the set of values and operations specific to values of that type. A type is specified by a type name. Named instances of the boolean, numeric, and string types are keywords. The names are not case sensitive. Note: The blob type is exchanged between the back end and the API as []byte. On 32 bit platforms this limits the size which the implementation can handle to 2G. A boolean type represents the set of Boolean truth values denoted by the predeclared constants true and false. The predeclared boolean type is bool. A duration type represents the elapsed time between two instants as an int64 nanosecond count. The representation limits the largest representable duration to approximately 290 years. A numeric type represents sets of integer or floating-point values. The predeclared architecture-independent numeric types are The value of an n-bit integer is n bits wide and represented using two's complement arithmetic. Conversions are required when different numeric types are mixed in an expression or assignment. A string type represents the set of string values. A string value is a (possibly empty) sequence of bytes. The case insensitive keyword for the string type is 'string'. The length of a string (its size in bytes) can be discovered using the built-in function len. A time type represents an instant in time with nanosecond precision. Each time has associated with it a location, consulted when computing the presentation form of the time. The following functions are implicitly declared An expression specifies the computation of a value by applying operators and functions to operands. Operands denote the elementary values in an expression. An operand may be a literal, a (possibly qualified) identifier denoting a constant or a function or a table/record set column, or a parenthesized expression. A qualified identifier is an identifier qualified with a table/record set name prefix. For example Primary expression are the operands for unary and binary expressions. For example A primary expression of the form denotes the element of a string indexed by x. Its type is byte. The value x is called the index. The following rules apply - The index x must be of integer type except bigint or duration; it is in range if 0 <= x < len(s), otherwise it is out of range. - A constant index must be non-negative and representable by a value of type int. - A constant index must be in range if the string a is a literal. - If x is out of range at run time, a run-time error occurs. - s[x] is the byte at index x and the type of s[x] is byte. If s is NULL or x is NULL then the result is NULL. Otherwise s[x] is illegal. For a string, the primary expression constructs a substring. The indices low and high select which elements appear in the result. The result has indices starting at 0 and length equal to high - low. For convenience, any of the indices may be omitted. A missing low index defaults to zero; a missing high index defaults to the length of the sliced operand The indices low and high are in range if 0 <= low <= high <= len(a), otherwise they are out of range. A constant index must be non-negative and representable by a value of type int. If both indices are constant, they must satisfy low <= high. If the indices are out of range at run time, a run-time error occurs. Integer values of type bigint or duration cannot be used as indices. If s is NULL the result is NULL. If low or high is not omitted and is NULL then the result is NULL. Given an identifier f denoting a predeclared function, calls f with arguments a1, a2, … an. Arguments are evaluated before the function is called. The type of the expression is the result type of f. In a function call, the function value and arguments are evaluated in the usual order. After they are evaluated, the parameters of the call are passed by value to the function and the called function begins execution. The return value of the function is passed by value when the function returns. Calling an undefined function causes a compile-time error. Operators combine operands into expressions. Comparisons are discussed elsewhere. For other binary operators, the operand types must be identical unless the operation involves shifts or untyped constants. For operations involving constants only, see the section on constant expressions. Except for shift operations, if one operand is an untyped constant and the other operand is not, the constant is converted to the type of the other operand. The right operand in a shift expression must have unsigned integer type or be an untyped constant that can be converted to unsigned integer type. If the left operand of a non-constant shift expression is an untyped constant, the type of the constant is what it would be if the shift expression were replaced by its left operand alone. Expressions of the form yield a boolean value true if expr2, a regular expression, matches expr1 (see also [6]). Both expression must be of type string. If any one of the expressions is NULL the result is NULL. Predicates are special form expressions having a boolean result type. Expressions of the form are equivalent, including NULL handling, to The types of involved expressions must be comparable as defined in "Comparison operators". Another form of the IN predicate creates the expression list from a result of a SelectStmt. The SelectStmt must select only one column. The produced expression list is resource limited by the memory available to the process. NULL values produced by the SelectStmt are ignored, but if all records of the SelectStmt are NULL the predicate yields NULL. The select statement is evaluated only once. If the type of expr is not the same as the type of the field returned by the SelectStmt then the set operation yields false. The type of the column returned by the SelectStmt must be one of the simple (non blob-like) types: Expressions of the form are equivalent, including NULL handling, to The types of involved expressions must be ordered as defined in "Comparison operators". Expressions of the form yield a boolean value true if expr does not have a specific type (case A) or if expr has a specific type (case B). In other cases the result is a boolean value false. Unary operators have the highest precedence. There are five precedence levels for binary operators. Multiplication operators bind strongest, followed by addition operators, comparison operators, && (logical AND), and finally || (logical OR) Binary operators of the same precedence associate from left to right. For instance, x / y * z is the same as (x / y) * z. Note that the operator precedence is reflected explicitly by the grammar. Arithmetic operators apply to numeric values and yield a result of the same type as the first operand. The four standard arithmetic operators (+, -, *, /) apply to integer, rational, floating-point, and complex types; + also applies to strings; +,- also applies to times. All other arithmetic operators apply to integers only. sum integers, rationals, floats, complex values, strings difference integers, rationals, floats, complex values, times product integers, rationals, floats, complex values / quotient integers, rationals, floats, complex values % remainder integers & bitwise AND integers | bitwise OR integers ^ bitwise XOR integers &^ bit clear (AND NOT) integers << left shift integer << unsigned integer >> right shift integer >> unsigned integer Strings can be concatenated using the + operator String addition creates a new string by concatenating the operands. A value of type duration can be added to or subtracted from a value of type time. Times can subtracted from each other producing a value of type duration. For two integer values x and y, the integer quotient q = x / y and remainder r = x % y satisfy the following relationships with x / y truncated towards zero ("truncated division"). As an exception to this rule, if the dividend x is the most negative value for the int type of x, the quotient q = x / -1 is equal to x (and r = 0). If the divisor is a constant expression, it must not be zero. If the divisor is zero at run time, a run-time error occurs. If the dividend is non-negative and the divisor is a constant power of 2, the division may be replaced by a right shift, and computing the remainder may be replaced by a bitwise AND operation The shift operators shift the left operand by the shift count specified by the right operand. They implement arithmetic shifts if the left operand is a signed integer and logical shifts if it is an unsigned integer. There is no upper limit on the shift count. Shifts behave as if the left operand is shifted n times by 1 for a shift count of n. As a result, x << 1 is the same as x*2 and x >> 1 is the same as x/2 but truncated towards negative infinity. For integer operands, the unary operators +, -, and ^ are defined as follows For floating-point and complex numbers, +x is the same as x, while -x is the negation of x. The result of a floating-point or complex division by zero is not specified beyond the IEEE-754 standard; whether a run-time error occurs is implementation-specific. Whenever any operand of any arithmetic operation, unary or binary, is NULL, as well as in the case of the string concatenating operation, the result is NULL. For unsigned integer values, the operations +, -, *, and << are computed modulo 2n, where n is the bit width of the unsigned integer's type. Loosely speaking, these unsigned integer operations discard high bits upon overflow, and expressions may rely on “wrap around”. For signed integers with a finite bit width, the operations +, -, *, and << may legally overflow and the resulting value exists and is deterministically defined by the signed integer representation, the operation, and its operands. No exception is raised as a result of overflow. An evaluator may not optimize an expression under the assumption that overflow does not occur. For instance, it may not assume that x < x + 1 is always true. Integers of type bigint and rationals do not overflow but their handling is limited by the memory resources available to the program. Comparison operators compare two operands and yield a boolean value. In any comparison, the first operand must be of same type as is the second operand, or vice versa. The equality operators == and != apply to operands that are comparable. The ordering operators <, <=, >, and >= apply to operands that are ordered. These terms and the result of the comparisons are defined as follows - Boolean values are comparable. Two boolean values are equal if they are either both true or both false. - Complex values are comparable. Two complex values u and v are equal if both real(u) == real(v) and imag(u) == imag(v). - Integer values are comparable and ordered, in the usual way. Note that durations are integers. - Floating point values are comparable and ordered, as defined by the IEEE-754 standard. - Rational values are comparable and ordered, in the usual way. - String values are comparable and ordered, lexically byte-wise. - Time values are comparable and ordered. Whenever any operand of any comparison operation is NULL, the result is NULL. Note that slices are always of type string. Logical operators apply to boolean values and yield a boolean result. The right operand is evaluated conditionally. The truth tables for logical operations with NULL values Conversions are expressions of the form T(x) where T is a type and x is an expression that can be converted to type T. A constant value x can be converted to type T in any of these cases: - x is representable by a value of type T. - x is a floating-point constant, T is a floating-point type, and x is representable by a value of type T after rounding using IEEE 754 round-to-even rules. The constant T(x) is the rounded value. - x is an integer constant and T is a string type. The same rule as for non-constant x applies in this case. Converting a constant yields a typed constant as result. A non-constant value x can be converted to type T in any of these cases: - x has type T. - x's type and T are both integer or floating point types. - x's type and T are both complex types. - x is an integer, except bigint or duration, and T is a string type. Specific rules apply to (non-constant) conversions between numeric types or to and from a string type. These conversions may change the representation of x and incur a run-time cost. All other conversions only change the type but not the representation of x. A conversion of NULL to any type yields NULL. For the conversion of non-constant numeric values, the following rules apply 1. When converting between integer types, if the value is a signed integer, it is sign extended to implicit infinite precision; otherwise it is zero extended. It is then truncated to fit in the result type's size. For example, if v == uint16(0x10F0), then uint32(int8(v)) == 0xFFFFFFF0. The conversion always yields a valid value; there is no indication of overflow. 2. When converting a floating-point number to an integer, the fraction is discarded (truncation towards zero). 3. When converting an integer or floating-point number to a floating-point type, or a complex number to another complex type, the result value is rounded to the precision specified by the destination type. For instance, the value of a variable x of type float32 may be stored using additional precision beyond that of an IEEE-754 32-bit number, but float32(x) represents the result of rounding x's value to 32-bit precision. Similarly, x + 0.1 may use more than 32 bits of precision, but float32(x + 0.1) does not. In all non-constant conversions involving floating-point or complex values, if the result type cannot represent the value the conversion succeeds but the result value is implementation-dependent. 1. Converting a signed or unsigned integer value to a string type yields a string containing the UTF-8 representation of the integer. Values outside the range of valid Unicode code points are converted to "\uFFFD". 2. Converting a blob to a string type yields a string whose successive bytes are the elements of the blob. 3. Converting a value of a string type to a blob yields a blob whose successive elements are the bytes of the string. 4. Converting a value of a bigint type to a string yields a string containing the decimal decimal representation of the integer. 5. Converting a value of a string type to a bigint yields a bigint value containing the integer represented by the string value. A prefix of “0x” or “0X” selects base 16; the “0” prefix selects base 8, and a “0b” or “0B” prefix selects base 2. Otherwise the value is interpreted in base 10. An error occurs if the string value is not in any valid format. 6. Converting a value of a rational type to a string yields a string containing the decimal decimal representation of the rational in the form "a/b" (even if b == 1). 7. Converting a value of a string type to a bigrat yields a bigrat value containing the rational represented by the string value. The string can be given as a fraction "a/b" or as a floating-point number optionally followed by an exponent. An error occurs if the string value is not in any valid format. 8. Converting a value of a duration type to a string returns a string representing the duration in the form "72h3m0.5s". Leading zero units are omitted. As a special case, durations less than one second format using a smaller unit (milli-, micro-, or nanoseconds) to ensure that the leading digit is non-zero. The zero duration formats as 0, with no unit. 9. Converting a string value to a duration yields a duration represented by the string. A duration string is a possibly signed sequence of decimal numbers, each with optional fraction and a unit suffix, such as "300ms", "-1.5h" or "2h45m". Valid time units are "ns", "us" (or "µs"), "ms", "s", "m", "h". 10. Converting a time value to a string returns the time formatted using the format string When evaluating the operands of an expression or of function calls, operations are evaluated in lexical left-to-right order. For example, in the evaluation of the function calls and evaluation of c happen in the order h(), i(), j(), c. Floating-point operations within a single expression are evaluated according to the associativity of the operators. Explicit parentheses affect the evaluation by overriding the default associativity. In the expression x + (y + z) the addition y + z is performed before adding x. Statements control execution. The empty statement does nothing. Alter table statements modify existing tables. With the ADD clause it adds a new column to the table. The column must not exist. With the DROP clause it removes an existing column from a table. The column must exist and it must be not the only (last) column of the table. IOW, there cannot be a table with no columns. For example When adding a column to a table with existing data, the constraint clause of the ColumnDef cannot be used. Adding a constrained column to an empty table is fine. Begin transactions statements introduce a new transaction level. Every transaction level must be eventually balanced by exactly one of COMMIT or ROLLBACK statements. Note that when a transaction is roll-backed because of a statement failure then no explicit balancing of the respective BEGIN TRANSACTION is statement is required nor permitted. Failure to properly balance any opened transaction level may cause dead locks and/or lose of data updated in the uppermost opened but never properly closed transaction level. For example A database cannot be updated (mutated) outside of a transaction. Statements requiring a transaction A database is effectively read only outside of a transaction. Statements not requiring a transaction The commit statement closes the innermost transaction nesting level. If that's the outermost level then the updates to the DB made by the transaction are atomically made persistent. For example Create index statements create new indices. Index is a named projection of ordered values of a table column to the respective records. As a special case the id() of the record can be indexed. Index name must not be the same as any of the existing tables and it also cannot be the same as of any column name of the table the index is on. For example Now certain SELECT statements may use the indices to speed up joins and/or to speed up record set filtering when the WHERE clause is used; or the indices might be used to improve the performance when the ORDER BY clause is present. The UNIQUE modifier requires the indexed values tuple to be index-wise unique or have all values NULL. The optional IF NOT EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the index already exists. A simple index consists of only one expression which must be either a column name or the built-in id(). A more complex and more general index is one that consists of more than one expression or its single expression does not qualify as a simple index. In this case the type of all expressions in the list must be one of the non blob-like types. Note: Blob-like types are blob, bigint, bigrat, time and duration. Create table statements create new tables. A column definition declares the column name and type. Table names and column names are case sensitive. Neither a table or an index of the same name may exist in the DB. For example The optional IF NOT EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the table already exists. The optional constraint clause has two forms. The first one is found in many SQL dialects. This form prevents the data in column DepartmentName to be NULL. The second form allows an arbitrary boolean expression to be used to validate the column. If the value of the expression is true then the validation succeeded. If the value of the expression is false or NULL then the validation fails. If the value of the expression is not of type bool an error occurs. The optional DEFAULT clause is an expression which, if present, is substituted instead of a NULL value when the colum is assigned a value. Note that the constraint and/or default expressions may refer to other columns by name: When a table row is inserted by the INSERT INTO statement or when a table row is updated by the UPDATE statement, the order of operations is as follows: 1. The new values of the affected columns are set and the values of all the row columns become the named values which can be referred to in default expressions evaluated in step 2. 2. If any row column value is NULL and the DEFAULT clause is present in the column's definition, the default expression is evaluated and its value is set as the respective column value. 3. The values, potentially updated, of row columns become the named values which can be referred to in constraint expressions evaluated during step 4. 4. All row columns which definition has the constraint clause present will have that constraint checked. If any constraint violation is detected, the overall operation fails and no changes to the table are made. Delete from statements remove rows from a table, which must exist. For example If the WHERE clause is not present then all rows are removed and the statement is equivalent to the TRUNCATE TABLE statement. Drop index statements remove indices from the DB. The index must exist. For example The optional IF EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the index does not exist. Drop table statements remove tables from the DB. The table must exist. For example The optional IF EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the table does not exist. Insert into statements insert new rows into tables. New rows come from literal data, if using the VALUES clause, or are a result of select statement. In the later case the select statement is fully evaluated before the insertion of any rows is performed, allowing to insert values calculated from the same table rows are to be inserted into. If the ColumnNameList part is omitted then the number of values inserted in the row must be the same as are columns in the table. If the ColumnNameList part is present then the number of values per row must be same as the same number of column names. All other columns of the record are set to NULL. The type of the value assigned to a column must be the same as is the column's type or the value must be NULL. For example If any of the columns of the table were defined using the optional constraints clause or the optional defaults clause then those are processed on a per row basis. The details are discussed in the "Constraints and defaults" chapter below the CREATE TABLE statement documentation. Explain statement produces a recordset consisting of lines of text which describe the execution plan of a statement, if any. For example, the QL tool treats the explain statement specially and outputs the joined lines: The explanation may aid in uderstanding how a statement/query would be executed and if indices are used as expected - or which indices may possibly improve the statement performance. The create index statements above were directly copy/pasted in the terminal from the suggestions provided by the filter recordset pipeline part returned by the explain statement. If the statement has nothing special in its plan, the result is the original statement. To get an explanation of the select statement of the IN predicate, use the EXPLAIN statement with that particular select statement. The rollback statement closes the innermost transaction nesting level discarding any updates to the DB made by it. If that's the outermost level then the effects on the DB are as if the transaction never happened. For example The (temporary) record set from the last statement is returned and can be processed by the client. In this case the rollback is the same as 'DROP TABLE tmp;' but it can be a more complex operation. Select from statements produce recordsets. The optional DISTINCT modifier ensures all rows in the result recordset are unique. Either all of the resulting fields are returned ('*') or only those named in FieldList. RecordSetList is a list of table names or parenthesized select statements, optionally (re)named using the AS clause. The result can be filtered using a WhereClause and orderd by the OrderBy clause. For example If Recordset is a nested, parenthesized SelectStmt then it must be given a name using the AS clause if its field are to be accessible in expressions. A field is an named expression. Identifiers, not used as a type in conversion or a function name in the Call clause, denote names of (other) fields, values of which should be used in the expression. The expression can be named using the AS clause. If the AS clause is not present and the expression consists solely of a field name, then that field name is used as the name of the resulting field. Otherwise the field is unnamed. For example The SELECT statement can optionally enumerate the desired/resulting fields in a list. No two identical field names can appear in the list. When more than one record set is used in the FROM clause record set list, the result record set field names are rewritten to be qualified using the record set names. If a particular record set doesn't have a name, its respective fields became unnamed. The optional JOIN clause, for example is mostly equal to except that the rows from a which, when they appear in the cross join, never made expr to evaluate to true, are combined with a virtual row from b, containing all nulls, and added to the result set. For the RIGHT JOIN variant the discussed rules are used for rows from b not satisfying expr == true and the virtual, all-null row "comes" from a. The FULL JOIN adds the respective rows which would be otherwise provided by the separate executions of the LEFT JOIN and RIGHT JOIN variants. For more thorough OUTER JOIN discussion please see the Wikipedia article at [10]. Resultins rows of a SELECT statement can be optionally ordered by the ORDER BY clause. Collating proceeds by considering the expressions in the expression list left to right until a collating order is determined. Any possibly remaining expressions are not evaluated. All of the expression values must yield an ordered type or NULL. Ordered types are defined in "Comparison operators". Collating of elements having a NULL value is different compared to what the comparison operators yield in expression evaluation (NULL result instead of a boolean value). Below, T denotes a non NULL value of any QL type. NULL collates before any non NULL value (is considered smaller than T). Two NULLs have no collating order (are considered equal). The WHERE clause restricts records considered by some statements, like SELECT FROM, DELETE FROM, or UPDATE. It is an error if the expression evaluates to a non null value of non bool type. The GROUP BY clause is used to project rows having common values into a smaller set of rows. For example Using the GROUP BY without any aggregate functions in the selected fields is in certain cases equal to using the DISTINCT modifier. The last two examples above produce the same resultsets. The optional OFFSET clause allows to ignore first N records. For example The above will produce only rows 11, 12, ... of the record set, if they exist. The value of the expression must a non negative integer, but not bigint or duration. The optional LIMIT clause allows to ignore all but first N records. For example The above will return at most the first 10 records of the record set. The value of the expression must a non negative integer, but not bigint or duration. The LIMIT and OFFSET clauses can be combined. For example Considering table t has, say 10 records, the above will produce only records 4 - 8. After returning record #8, no more result rows/records are computed. 1. The FROM clause is evaluated, producing a Cartesian product of its source record sets (tables or nested SELECT statements). 2. If present, the JOIN cluase is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation and the recordset specified by the JOIN clause. (... JOIN Recordset ON ...) 3. If present, the WHERE clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation. 4. If present, the GROUP BY clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 5. The SELECT field expressions are evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 6. If present, the DISTINCT modifier is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 7. If present, the ORDER BY clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 8. If present, the OFFSET clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). The offset expression is evaluated once for the first record produced by the previous evaluations. 9. If present, the LIMIT clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). The limit expression is evaluated once for the first record produced by the previous evaluations. Truncate table statements remove all records from a table. The table must exist. For example Update statements change values of fields in rows of a table. For example Note: The SET clause is optional. If any of the columns of the table were defined using the optional constraints clause or the optional defaults clause then those are processed on a per row basis. The details are discussed in the "Constraints and defaults" chapter below the CREATE TABLE statement documentation. To allow to query for DB meta data, there exist specially named tables, some of them being virtual. Note: Virtual system tables may have fake table-wise unique but meaningless and unstable record IDs. Do not apply the built-in id() to any system table. The table __Table lists all tables in the DB. The schema is The Schema column returns the statement to (re)create table Name. This table is virtual. The table __Colum lists all columns of all tables in the DB. The schema is The Ordinal column defines the 1-based index of the column in the record. This table is virtual. The table __Colum2 lists all columns of all tables in the DB which have the constraint NOT NULL or which have a constraint expression defined or which have a default expression defined. The schema is It's possible to obtain a consolidated recordset for all properties of all DB columns using The Name column is the column name in TableName. The table __Index lists all indices in the DB. The schema is The IsUnique columns reflects if the index was created using the optional UNIQUE clause. This table is virtual. Built-in functions are predeclared. The built-in aggregate function avg returns the average of values of an expression. Avg ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if avg is applied to an empty record set. The column values must be of a numeric type. The built-in function contains returns true if substr is within s. If any argument to contains is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in aggregate function count returns how many times an expression has a non NULL values or the number of rows in a record set. Note: count() returns 0 for an empty record set. For example Date returns the time corresponding to in the appropriate zone for that time in the given location. The month, day, hour, min, sec, and nsec values may be outside their usual ranges and will be normalized during the conversion. For example, October 32 converts to November 1. A daylight savings time transition skips or repeats times. For example, in the United States, March 13, 2011 2:15am never occurred, while November 6, 2011 1:15am occurred twice. In such cases, the choice of time zone, and therefore the time, is not well-defined. Date returns a time that is correct in one of the two zones involved in the transition, but it does not guarantee which. A location maps time instants to the zone in use at that time. Typically, the location represents the collection of time offsets in use in a geographical area, such as "CEST" and "CET" for central Europe. "local" represents the system's local time zone. "UTC" represents Universal Coordinated Time (UTC). The month specifies a month of the year (January = 1, ...). If any argument to date is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function day returns the day of the month specified by t. If the argument to day is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function formatTime returns a textual representation of the time value formatted according to layout, which defines the format by showing how the reference time, would be displayed if it were the value; it serves as an example of the desired output. The same display rules will then be applied to the time value. If any argument to formatTime is NULL the result is NULL. NOTE: The string value of the time zone, like "CET" or "ACDT", is dependent on the time zone of the machine the function is run on. For example, if the t value is in "CET", but the machine is in "ACDT", instead of "CET" the result is "+0100". This is the same what Go (time.Time).String() returns and in fact formatTime directly calls t.String(). returns on a machine in the CET time zone, but may return on a machine in the ACDT zone. The time value is in both cases the same so its ordering and comparing is correct. Only the display value can differ. The built-in functions formatFloat and formatInt format numbers to strings using go's number format functions in the `strconv` package. For all three functions, only the first argument is mandatory. The default values of the rest are shown in the examples. If the first argument is NULL, the result is NULL. returns returns returns Unlike the `strconv` equivalent, the formatInt function handles all integer types, both signed and unsigned. The built-in function hasPrefix tests whether the string s begins with prefix. If any argument to hasPrefix is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function hasSuffix tests whether the string s ends with suffix. If any argument to hasSuffix is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function hour returns the hour within the day specified by t, in the range [0, 23]. If the argument to hour is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function hours returns the duration as a floating point number of hours. If the argument to hours is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function id takes zero or one arguments. If no argument is provided, id() returns a table-unique automatically assigned numeric identifier of type int. Ids of deleted records are not reused unless the DB becomes completely empty (has no tables). For example If id() without arguments is called for a row which is not a table record then the result value is NULL. For example If id() has one argument it must be a table name of a table in a cross join. For example The built-in function len takes a string argument and returns the lentgh of the string in bytes. The expression len(s) is constant if s is a string constant. If the argument to len is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in aggregate function max returns the largest value of an expression in a record set. Max ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if max is applied to an empty record set. The expression values must be of an ordered type. For example The built-in aggregate function min returns the smallest value of an expression in a record set. Min ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if min is applied to an empty record set. For example The column values must be of an ordered type. The built-in function minute returns the minute offset within the hour specified by t, in the range [0, 59]. If the argument to minute is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function minutes returns the duration as a floating point number of minutes. If the argument to minutes is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function month returns the month of the year specified by t (January = 1, ...). If the argument to month is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function nanosecond returns the nanosecond offset within the second specified by t, in the range [0, 999999999]. If the argument to nanosecond is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function nanoseconds returns the duration as an integer nanosecond count. If the argument to nanoseconds is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function now returns the current local time. The built-in function parseTime parses a formatted string and returns the time value it represents. The layout defines the format by showing how the reference time, would be interpreted if it were the value; it serves as an example of the input format. The same interpretation will then be made to the input string. Elements omitted from the value are assumed to be zero or, when zero is impossible, one, so parsing "3:04pm" returns the time corresponding to Jan 1, year 0, 15:04:00 UTC (note that because the year is 0, this time is before the zero Time). Years must be in the range 0000..9999. The day of the week is checked for syntax but it is otherwise ignored. In the absence of a time zone indicator, parseTime returns a time in UTC. When parsing a time with a zone offset like -0700, if the offset corresponds to a time zone used by the current location, then parseTime uses that location and zone in the returned time. Otherwise it records the time as being in a fabricated location with time fixed at the given zone offset. When parsing a time with a zone abbreviation like MST, if the zone abbreviation has a defined offset in the current location, then that offset is used. The zone abbreviation "UTC" is recognized as UTC regardless of location. If the zone abbreviation is unknown, Parse records the time as being in a fabricated location with the given zone abbreviation and a zero offset. This choice means that such a time can be parses and reformatted with the same layout losslessly, but the exact instant used in the representation will differ by the actual zone offset. To avoid such problems, prefer time layouts that use a numeric zone offset. If any argument to parseTime is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function second returns the second offset within the minute specified by t, in the range [0, 59]. If the argument to second is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function seconds returns the duration as a floating point number of seconds. If the argument to seconds is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function since returns the time elapsed since t. It is shorthand for now()-t. If the argument to since is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in aggregate function sum returns the sum of values of an expression for all rows of a record set. Sum ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if sum is applied to an empty record set. The column values must be of a numeric type. The built-in function timeIn returns t with the location information set to loc. For discussion of the loc argument please see date(). If any argument to timeIn is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function weekday returns the day of the week specified by t. Sunday == 0, Monday == 1, ... If the argument to weekday is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function year returns the year in which t occurs. If the argument to year is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function yearDay returns the day of the year specified by t, in the range [1,365] for non-leap years, and [1,366] in leap years. If the argument to yearDay is NULL the result is NULL. Three functions assemble and disassemble complex numbers. The built-in function complex constructs a complex value from a floating-point real and imaginary part, while real and imag extract the real and imaginary parts of a complex value. The type of the arguments and return value correspond. For complex, the two arguments must be of the same floating-point type and the return type is the complex type with the corresponding floating-point constituents: complex64 for float32, complex128 for float64. The real and imag functions together form the inverse, so for a complex value z, z == complex(real(z), imag(z)). If the operands of these functions are all constants, the return value is a constant. If any argument to any of complex, real, imag functions is NULL the result is NULL. For the numeric types, the following sizes are guaranteed Portions of this specification page are modifications based on work[2] created and shared by Google[3] and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License[4]. This specification is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, and code is licensed under a BSD license[5]. Links from the above documentation This section is not part of the specification. WARNING: The implementation of indices is new and it surely needs more time to become mature. Indices are used currently used only by the WHERE clause. The following expression patterns of 'WHERE expression' are recognized and trigger index use. The relOp is one of the relation operators <, <=, ==, >=, >. For the equality operator both operands must be of comparable types. For all other operators both operands must be of ordered types. The constant expression is a compile time constant expression. Some constant folding is still a TODO. Parameter is a QL parameter ($1 etc.). Consider tables t and u, both with an indexed field f. The WHERE expression doesn't comply with the above simple detected cases. However, such query is now automatically rewritten to which will use both of the indices. The impact of using the indices can be substantial (cf. BenchmarkCrossJoin*) if the resulting rows have low "selectivity", ie. only few rows from both tables are selected by the respective WHERE filtering. Note: Existing QL DBs can be used and indices can be added to them. However, once any indices are present in the DB, the old QL versions cannot work with such DB anymore. Running a benchmark with -v (-test.v) outputs information about the scale used to report records/s and a brief description of the benchmark. For example Running the full suite of benchmarks takes a lot of time. Use the -timeout flag to avoid them being killed after the default time limit (10 minutes).
Package ql implements a pure Go embedded SQL database engine. QL is a member of the SQL family of languages. It is less complex and less powerful than SQL (whichever specification SQL is considered to be). 2016-03-17: Release v1.0.1 adjusts for latest goyacc. Parser error messages are improved and changed, but their exact form is not considered a API change. 2016-03-05: The current version has been tagged v1.0.0. 2015-06-15: To improve compatibility with other SQL implementations, the count built-in aggregate function now accepts * as its argument. 2015-05-29: The execution planner was rewritten from scratch. It should use indices in all places where they were used before plus in some additional situations. It is possible to investigate the plan using the newly added EXPLAIN statement. The QL tool is handy for such analysis. If the planner would have used an index, but no such exists, the plan includes hints in form of copy/paste ready CREATE INDEX statements. The planner is still quite simple and a lot of work on it is yet ahead. You can help this process by filling an issue with a schema and query which fails to use an index or indices when it should, in your opinion. Bonus points for including output of `ql 'explain <query>'`. 2015-05-09: The grammar of the CREATE INDEX statement now accepts an expression list instead of a single expression, which was further limited to just a column name or the built-in id(). As a side effect, composite indices are now functional. However, the values in the expression-list style index are not yet used by other statements or the statement/query planner. The composite index is useful while having UNIQUE clause to check for semantically duplicate rows before they get added to the table or when such a row is mutated using the UPDATE statement and the expression-list style index tuple of the row is thus recomputed. 2015-05-02: The Schema field of table __Table now correctly reflects any column constraints and/or defaults. Also, the (*DB).Info method now has that information provided in new ColumInfo fields NotNull, Constraint and Default. 2015-04-20: Added support for {LEFT,RIGHT,FULL} [OUTER] JOIN. 2015-04-18: Column definitions can now have constraints and defaults. Details are discussed in the "Constraints and defaults" chapter below the CREATE TABLE statement documentation. 2015-03-06: New built-in functions formatFloat and formatInt. Thanks urandom! (https://github.com/urandom) 2015-02-16: IN predicate now accepts a SELECT statement. See the updated "Predicates" section. 2015-01-17: Logical operators || and && have now alternative spellings: OR and AND (case insensitive). AND was a keyword before, but OR is a new one. This can possibly break existing queries. For the record, it's a good idea to not use any name appearing in, for example, [7] in your queries as the list of QL's keywords may expand for gaining better compatibility with existing SQL "standards". 2015-01-12: ACID guarantees were tightened at the cost of performance in some cases. The write collecting window mechanism, a formerly used implementation detail, was removed. Inserting rows one by one in a transaction is now slow. I mean very slow. Try to avoid inserting single rows in a transaction. Instead, whenever possible, perform batch updates of tens to, say thousands of rows in a single transaction. See also: http://www.sqlite.org/faq.html#q19, the discussed synchronization principles involved are the same as for QL, modulo minor details. Note: A side effect is that closing a DB before exiting an application, both for the Go API and through database/sql driver, is no more required, strictly speaking. Beware that exiting an application while there is an open (uncommitted) transaction in progress means losing the transaction data. However, the DB will not become corrupted because of not closing it. Nor that was the case before, but formerly failing to close a DB could have resulted in losing the data of the last transaction. 2014-09-21: id() now optionally accepts a single argument - a table name. 2014-09-01: Added the DB.Flush() method and the LIKE pattern matching predicate. 2014-08-08: The built in functions max and min now accept also time values. Thanks opennota! (https://github.com/opennota) 2014-06-05: RecordSet interface extended by new methods FirstRow and Rows. 2014-06-02: Indices on id() are now used by SELECT statements. 2014-05-07: Introduction of Marshal, Schema, Unmarshal. 2014-04-15: Added optional IF NOT EXISTS clause to CREATE INDEX and optional IF EXISTS clause to DROP INDEX. 2014-04-12: The column Unique in the virtual table __Index was renamed to IsUnique because the old name is a keyword. Unfortunately, this is a breaking change, sorry. 2014-04-11: Introduction of LIMIT, OFFSET. 2014-04-10: Introduction of query rewriting. 2014-04-07: Introduction of indices. QL imports zappy[8], a block-based compressor, which speeds up its performance by using a C version of the compression/decompression algorithms. If a CGO-free (pure Go) version of QL, or an app using QL, is required, please include 'purego' in the -tags option of go {build,get,install}. For example: If zappy was installed before installing QL, it might be necessary to rebuild zappy first (or rebuild QL with all its dependencies using the -a option): The syntax is specified using Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF) Lower-case production names are used to identify lexical tokens. Non-terminals are in CamelCase. Lexical tokens are enclosed in double quotes "" or back quotes “. The form a … b represents the set of characters from a through b as alternatives. The horizontal ellipsis … is also used elsewhere in the spec to informally denote various enumerations or code snippets that are not further specified. QL source code is Unicode text encoded in UTF-8. The text is not canonicalized, so a single accented code point is distinct from the same character constructed from combining an accent and a letter; those are treated as two code points. For simplicity, this document will use the unqualified term character to refer to a Unicode code point in the source text. Each code point is distinct; for instance, upper and lower case letters are different characters. Implementation restriction: For compatibility with other tools, the parser may disallow the NUL character (U+0000) in the statement. Implementation restriction: A byte order mark is disallowed anywhere in QL statements. The following terms are used to denote specific character classes The underscore character _ (U+005F) is considered a letter. Lexical elements are comments, tokens, identifiers, keywords, operators and delimiters, integer, floating-point, imaginary, rune and string literals and QL parameters. Line comments start with the character sequence // or -- and stop at the end of the line. A line comment acts like a space. General comments start with the character sequence /* and continue through the character sequence */. A general comment acts like a space. Comments do not nest. Tokens form the vocabulary of QL. There are four classes: identifiers, keywords, operators and delimiters, and literals. White space, formed from spaces (U+0020), horizontal tabs (U+0009), carriage returns (U+000D), and newlines (U+000A), is ignored except as it separates tokens that would otherwise combine into a single token. The formal grammar uses semicolons ";" as separators of QL statements. A single QL statement or the last QL statement in a list of statements can have an optional semicolon terminator. (Actually a separator from the following empty statement.) Identifiers name entities such as tables or record set columns. An identifier is a sequence of one or more letters and digits. The first character in an identifier must be a letter. For example No identifiers are predeclared, however note that no keyword can be used as an identifier. Identifiers starting with two underscores are used for meta data virtual tables names. For forward compatibility, users should generally avoid using any identifiers starting with two underscores. For example The following keywords are reserved and may not be used as identifiers. Keywords are not case sensitive. The following character sequences represent operators, delimiters, and other special tokens Operators consisting of more than one character are referred to by names in the rest of the documentation An integer literal is a sequence of digits representing an integer constant. An optional prefix sets a non-decimal base: 0 for octal, 0x or 0X for hexadecimal. In hexadecimal literals, letters a-f and A-F represent values 10 through 15. For example A floating-point literal is a decimal representation of a floating-point constant. It has an integer part, a decimal point, a fractional part, and an exponent part. The integer and fractional part comprise decimal digits; the exponent part is an e or E followed by an optionally signed decimal exponent. One of the integer part or the fractional part may be elided; one of the decimal point or the exponent may be elided. For example An imaginary literal is a decimal representation of the imaginary part of a complex constant. It consists of a floating-point literal or decimal integer followed by the lower-case letter i. For example A rune literal represents a rune constant, an integer value identifying a Unicode code point. A rune literal is expressed as one or more characters enclosed in single quotes. Within the quotes, any character may appear except single quote and newline. A single quoted character represents the Unicode value of the character itself, while multi-character sequences beginning with a backslash encode values in various formats. The simplest form represents the single character within the quotes; since QL statements are Unicode characters encoded in UTF-8, multiple UTF-8-encoded bytes may represent a single integer value. For instance, the literal 'a' holds a single byte representing a literal a, Unicode U+0061, value 0x61, while 'ä' holds two bytes (0xc3 0xa4) representing a literal a-dieresis, U+00E4, value 0xe4. Several backslash escapes allow arbitrary values to be encoded as ASCII text. There are four ways to represent the integer value as a numeric constant: \x followed by exactly two hexadecimal digits; \u followed by exactly four hexadecimal digits; \U followed by exactly eight hexadecimal digits, and a plain backslash \ followed by exactly three octal digits. In each case the value of the literal is the value represented by the digits in the corresponding base. Although these representations all result in an integer, they have different valid ranges. Octal escapes must represent a value between 0 and 255 inclusive. Hexadecimal escapes satisfy this condition by construction. The escapes \u and \U represent Unicode code points so within them some values are illegal, in particular those above 0x10FFFF and surrogate halves. After a backslash, certain single-character escapes represent special values All other sequences starting with a backslash are illegal inside rune literals. For example A string literal represents a string constant obtained from concatenating a sequence of characters. There are two forms: raw string literals and interpreted string literals. Raw string literals are character sequences between back quotes “. Within the quotes, any character is legal except back quote. The value of a raw string literal is the string composed of the uninterpreted (implicitly UTF-8-encoded) characters between the quotes; in particular, backslashes have no special meaning and the string may contain newlines. Carriage returns inside raw string literals are discarded from the raw string value. Interpreted string literals are character sequences between double quotes "". The text between the quotes, which may not contain newlines, forms the value of the literal, with backslash escapes interpreted as they are in rune literals (except that \' is illegal and \" is legal), with the same restrictions. The three-digit octal (\nnn) and two-digit hexadecimal (\xnn) escapes represent individual bytes of the resulting string; all other escapes represent the (possibly multi-byte) UTF-8 encoding of individual characters. Thus inside a string literal \377 and \xFF represent a single byte of value 0xFF=255, while ÿ, \u00FF, \U000000FF and \xc3\xbf represent the two bytes 0xc3 0xbf of the UTF-8 encoding of character U+00FF. For example These examples all represent the same string If the statement source represents a character as two code points, such as a combining form involving an accent and a letter, the result will be an error if placed in a rune literal (it is not a single code point), and will appear as two code points if placed in a string literal. Literals are assigned their values from the respective text representation at "compile" (parse) time. QL parameters provide the same functionality as literals, but their value is assigned at execution time from an expression list passed to DB.Run or DB.Execute. Using '?' or '$' is completely equivalent. For example Keywords 'false' and 'true' (not case sensitive) represent the two possible constant values of type bool (also not case sensitive). Keyword 'NULL' (not case sensitive) represents an untyped constant which is assignable to any type. NULL is distinct from any other value of any type. A type determines the set of values and operations specific to values of that type. A type is specified by a type name. Named instances of the boolean, numeric, and string types are keywords. The names are not case sensitive. Note: The blob type is exchanged between the back end and the API as []byte. On 32 bit platforms this limits the size which the implementation can handle to 2G. A boolean type represents the set of Boolean truth values denoted by the predeclared constants true and false. The predeclared boolean type is bool. A duration type represents the elapsed time between two instants as an int64 nanosecond count. The representation limits the largest representable duration to approximately 290 years. A numeric type represents sets of integer or floating-point values. The predeclared architecture-independent numeric types are The value of an n-bit integer is n bits wide and represented using two's complement arithmetic. Conversions are required when different numeric types are mixed in an expression or assignment. A string type represents the set of string values. A string value is a (possibly empty) sequence of bytes. The case insensitive keyword for the string type is 'string'. The length of a string (its size in bytes) can be discovered using the built-in function len. A time type represents an instant in time with nanosecond precision. Each time has associated with it a location, consulted when computing the presentation form of the time. The following functions are implicitly declared An expression specifies the computation of a value by applying operators and functions to operands. Operands denote the elementary values in an expression. An operand may be a literal, a (possibly qualified) identifier denoting a constant or a function or a table/record set column, or a parenthesized expression. A qualified identifier is an identifier qualified with a table/record set name prefix. For example Primary expression are the operands for unary and binary expressions. For example A primary expression of the form denotes the element of a string indexed by x. Its type is byte. The value x is called the index. The following rules apply - The index x must be of integer type except bigint or duration; it is in range if 0 <= x < len(s), otherwise it is out of range. - A constant index must be non-negative and representable by a value of type int. - A constant index must be in range if the string a is a literal. - If x is out of range at run time, a run-time error occurs. - s[x] is the byte at index x and the type of s[x] is byte. If s is NULL or x is NULL then the result is NULL. Otherwise s[x] is illegal. For a string, the primary expression constructs a substring. The indices low and high select which elements appear in the result. The result has indices starting at 0 and length equal to high - low. For convenience, any of the indices may be omitted. A missing low index defaults to zero; a missing high index defaults to the length of the sliced operand The indices low and high are in range if 0 <= low <= high <= len(a), otherwise they are out of range. A constant index must be non-negative and representable by a value of type int. If both indices are constant, they must satisfy low <= high. If the indices are out of range at run time, a run-time error occurs. Integer values of type bigint or duration cannot be used as indices. If s is NULL the result is NULL. If low or high is not omitted and is NULL then the result is NULL. Given an identifier f denoting a predeclared function, calls f with arguments a1, a2, … an. Arguments are evaluated before the function is called. The type of the expression is the result type of f. In a function call, the function value and arguments are evaluated in the usual order. After they are evaluated, the parameters of the call are passed by value to the function and the called function begins execution. The return value of the function is passed by value when the function returns. Calling an undefined function causes a compile-time error. Operators combine operands into expressions. Comparisons are discussed elsewhere. For other binary operators, the operand types must be identical unless the operation involves shifts or untyped constants. For operations involving constants only, see the section on constant expressions. Except for shift operations, if one operand is an untyped constant and the other operand is not, the constant is converted to the type of the other operand. The right operand in a shift expression must have unsigned integer type or be an untyped constant that can be converted to unsigned integer type. If the left operand of a non-constant shift expression is an untyped constant, the type of the constant is what it would be if the shift expression were replaced by its left operand alone. Expressions of the form yeild a boolean value true if expr2, a regular expression, matches expr1 (see also [6]). Both expression must be of type string. If any one of the expressions is NULL the result is NULL. Predicates are special form expressions having a boolean result type. Expressions of the form are equivalent, including NULL handling, to The types of involved expressions must be comparable as defined in "Comparison operators". Another form of the IN predicate creates the expression list from a result of a SelectStmt. The SelectStmt must select only one column. The produced expression list is resource limited by the memory available to the process. NULL values produced by the SelectStmt are ignored, but if all records of the SelectStmt are NULL the predicate yields NULL. The select statement is evaluated only once. If the type of expr is not the same as the type of the field returned by the SelectStmt then the set operation yields false. The type of the column returned by the SelectStmt must be one of the simple (non blob-like) types: Expressions of the form are equivalent, including NULL handling, to The types of involved expressions must be ordered as defined in "Comparison operators". Expressions of the form yeild a boolean value true if expr does not have a specific type (case A) or if expr has a specific type (case B). In other cases the result is a boolean value false. Unary operators have the highest precedence. There are five precedence levels for binary operators. Multiplication operators bind strongest, followed by addition operators, comparison operators, && (logical AND), and finally || (logical OR) Binary operators of the same precedence associate from left to right. For instance, x / y * z is the same as (x / y) * z. Note that the operator precedence is reflected explicitly by the grammar. Arithmetic operators apply to numeric values and yield a result of the same type as the first operand. The four standard arithmetic operators (+, -, *, /) apply to integer, rational, floating-point, and complex types; + also applies to strings; +,- also applies to times. All other arithmetic operators apply to integers only. sum integers, rationals, floats, complex values, strings difference integers, rationals, floats, complex values, times product integers, rationals, floats, complex values / quotient integers, rationals, floats, complex values % remainder integers & bitwise AND integers | bitwise OR integers ^ bitwise XOR integers &^ bit clear (AND NOT) integers << left shift integer << unsigned integer >> right shift integer >> unsigned integer Strings can be concatenated using the + operator String addition creates a new string by concatenating the operands. A value of type duration can be added to or subtracted from a value of type time. Times can subtracted from each other producing a value of type duration. For two integer values x and y, the integer quotient q = x / y and remainder r = x % y satisfy the following relationships with x / y truncated towards zero ("truncated division"). As an exception to this rule, if the dividend x is the most negative value for the int type of x, the quotient q = x / -1 is equal to x (and r = 0). If the divisor is a constant expression, it must not be zero. If the divisor is zero at run time, a run-time error occurs. If the dividend is non-negative and the divisor is a constant power of 2, the division may be replaced by a right shift, and computing the remainder may be replaced by a bitwise AND operation The shift operators shift the left operand by the shift count specified by the right operand. They implement arithmetic shifts if the left operand is a signed integer and logical shifts if it is an unsigned integer. There is no upper limit on the shift count. Shifts behave as if the left operand is shifted n times by 1 for a shift count of n. As a result, x << 1 is the same as x*2 and x >> 1 is the same as x/2 but truncated towards negative infinity. For integer operands, the unary operators +, -, and ^ are defined as follows For floating-point and complex numbers, +x is the same as x, while -x is the negation of x. The result of a floating-point or complex division by zero is not specified beyond the IEEE-754 standard; whether a run-time error occurs is implementation-specific. Whenever any operand of any arithmetic operation, unary or binary, is NULL, as well as in the case of the string concatenating operation, the result is NULL. For unsigned integer values, the operations +, -, *, and << are computed modulo 2n, where n is the bit width of the unsigned integer's type. Loosely speaking, these unsigned integer operations discard high bits upon overflow, and expressions may rely on “wrap around”. For signed integers with a finite bit width, the operations +, -, *, and << may legally overflow and the resulting value exists and is deterministically defined by the signed integer representation, the operation, and its operands. No exception is raised as a result of overflow. An evaluator may not optimize an expression under the assumption that overflow does not occur. For instance, it may not assume that x < x + 1 is always true. Integers of type bigint and rationals do not overflow but their handling is limited by the memory resources available to the program. Comparison operators compare two operands and yield a boolean value. In any comparison, the first operand must be of same type as is the second operand, or vice versa. The equality operators == and != apply to operands that are comparable. The ordering operators <, <=, >, and >= apply to operands that are ordered. These terms and the result of the comparisons are defined as follows - Boolean values are comparable. Two boolean values are equal if they are either both true or both false. - Complex values are comparable. Two complex values u and v are equal if both real(u) == real(v) and imag(u) == imag(v). - Integer values are comparable and ordered, in the usual way. Note that durations are integers. - Floating point values are comparable and ordered, as defined by the IEEE-754 standard. - Rational values are comparable and ordered, in the usual way. - String values are comparable and ordered, lexically byte-wise. - Time values are comparable and ordered. Whenever any operand of any comparison operation is NULL, the result is NULL. Note that slices are always of type string. Logical operators apply to boolean values and yield a boolean result. The right operand is evaluated conditionally. The truth tables for logical operations with NULL values Conversions are expressions of the form T(x) where T is a type and x is an expression that can be converted to type T. A constant value x can be converted to type T in any of these cases: - x is representable by a value of type T. - x is a floating-point constant, T is a floating-point type, and x is representable by a value of type T after rounding using IEEE 754 round-to-even rules. The constant T(x) is the rounded value. - x is an integer constant and T is a string type. The same rule as for non-constant x applies in this case. Converting a constant yields a typed constant as result. A non-constant value x can be converted to type T in any of these cases: - x has type T. - x's type and T are both integer or floating point types. - x's type and T are both complex types. - x is an integer, except bigint or duration, and T is a string type. Specific rules apply to (non-constant) conversions between numeric types or to and from a string type. These conversions may change the representation of x and incur a run-time cost. All other conversions only change the type but not the representation of x. A conversion of NULL to any type yields NULL. For the conversion of non-constant numeric values, the following rules apply 1. When converting between integer types, if the value is a signed integer, it is sign extended to implicit infinite precision; otherwise it is zero extended. It is then truncated to fit in the result type's size. For example, if v == uint16(0x10F0), then uint32(int8(v)) == 0xFFFFFFF0. The conversion always yields a valid value; there is no indication of overflow. 2. When converting a floating-point number to an integer, the fraction is discarded (truncation towards zero). 3. When converting an integer or floating-point number to a floating-point type, or a complex number to another complex type, the result value is rounded to the precision specified by the destination type. For instance, the value of a variable x of type float32 may be stored using additional precision beyond that of an IEEE-754 32-bit number, but float32(x) represents the result of rounding x's value to 32-bit precision. Similarly, x + 0.1 may use more than 32 bits of precision, but float32(x + 0.1) does not. In all non-constant conversions involving floating-point or complex values, if the result type cannot represent the value the conversion succeeds but the result value is implementation-dependent. 1. Converting a signed or unsigned integer value to a string type yields a string containing the UTF-8 representation of the integer. Values outside the range of valid Unicode code points are converted to "\uFFFD". 2. Converting a blob to a string type yields a string whose successive bytes are the elements of the blob. 3. Converting a value of a string type to a blob yields a blob whose successive elements are the bytes of the string. 4. Converting a value of a bigint type to a string yields a string containing the decimal decimal representation of the integer. 5. Converting a value of a string type to a bigint yields a bigint value containing the integer represented by the string value. A prefix of “0x” or “0X” selects base 16; the “0” prefix selects base 8, and a “0b” or “0B” prefix selects base 2. Otherwise the value is interpreted in base 10. An error occurs if the string value is not in any valid format. 6. Converting a value of a rational type to a string yields a string containing the decimal decimal representation of the rational in the form "a/b" (even if b == 1). 7. Converting a value of a string type to a bigrat yields a bigrat value containing the rational represented by the string value. The string can be given as a fraction "a/b" or as a floating-point number optionally followed by an exponent. An error occurs if the string value is not in any valid format. 8. Converting a value of a duration type to a string returns a string representing the duration in the form "72h3m0.5s". Leading zero units are omitted. As a special case, durations less than one second format using a smaller unit (milli-, micro-, or nanoseconds) to ensure that the leading digit is non-zero. The zero duration formats as 0, with no unit. 9. Converting a string value to a duration yields a duration represented by the string. A duration string is a possibly signed sequence of decimal numbers, each with optional fraction and a unit suffix, such as "300ms", "-1.5h" or "2h45m". Valid time units are "ns", "us" (or "µs"), "ms", "s", "m", "h". 10. Converting a time value to a string returns the time formatted using the format string When evaluating the operands of an expression or of function calls, operations are evaluated in lexical left-to-right order. For example, in the evaluation of the function calls and evaluation of c happen in the order h(), i(), j(), c. Floating-point operations within a single expression are evaluated according to the associativity of the operators. Explicit parentheses affect the evaluation by overriding the default associativity. In the expression x + (y + z) the addition y + z is performed before adding x. Statements control execution. The empty statement does nothing. Alter table statements modify existing tables. With the ADD clause it adds a new column to the table. The column must not exist. With the DROP clause it removes an existing column from a table. The column must exist and it must be not the only (last) column of the table. IOW, there cannot be a table with no columns. For example When adding a column to a table with existing data, the constraint clause of the ColumnDef cannot be used. Adding a constrained column to an empty table is fine. Begin transactions statements introduce a new transaction level. Every transaction level must be eventually balanced by exactly one of COMMIT or ROLLBACK statements. Note that when a transaction is roll-backed because of a statement failure then no explicit balancing of the respective BEGIN TRANSACTION is statement is required nor permitted. Failure to properly balance any opened transaction level may cause dead locks and/or lose of data updated in the uppermost opened but never properly closed transaction level. For example A database cannot be updated (mutated) outside of a transaction. Statements requiring a transaction A database is effectively read only outside of a transaction. Statements not requiring a transaction The commit statement closes the innermost transaction nesting level. If that's the outermost level then the updates to the DB made by the transaction are atomically made persistent. For example Create index statements create new indices. Index is a named projection of ordered values of a table column to the respective records. As a special case the id() of the record can be indexed. Index name must not be the same as any of the existing tables and it also cannot be the same as of any column name of the table the index is on. For example Now certain SELECT statements may use the indices to speed up joins and/or to speed up record set filtering when the WHERE clause is used; or the indices might be used to improve the performance when the ORDER BY clause is present. The UNIQUE modifier requires the indexed values tuple to be index-wise unique or have all values NULL. The optional IF NOT EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the index already exists. A simple index consists of only one expression which must be either a column name or the built-in id(). A more complex and more general index is one that consists of more than one expression or its single expression does not qualify as a simple index. In this case the type of all expressions in the list must be one of the non blob-like types. Note: Blob-like types are blob, bigint, bigrat, time and duration. Create table statements create new tables. A column definition declares the column name and type. Table names and column names are case sensitive. Neither a table or an index of the same name may exist in the DB. For example The optional IF NOT EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the table already exists. The optional constraint clause has two forms. The first one is found in many SQL dialects. This form prevents the data in column DepartmentName to be NULL. The second form allows an arbitrary boolean expression to be used to validate the column. If the value of the expression is true then the validation succeeded. If the value of the expression is false or NULL then the validation fails. If the value of the expression is not of type bool an error occurs. The optional DEFAULT clause is an expression which, if present, is substituted instead of a NULL value when the colum is assigned a value. Note that the constraint and/or default expressions may refer to other columns by name: When a table row is inserted by the INSERT INTO statement or when a table row is updated by the UPDATE statement, the order of operations is as follows: 1. The new values of the affected columns are set and the values of all the row columns become the named values which can be referred to in default expressions evaluated in step 2. 2. If any row column value is NULL and the DEFAULT clause is present in the column's definition, the default expression is evaluated and its value is set as the respective column value. 3. The values, potentially updated, of row columns become the named values which can be referred to in constraint expressions evaluated during step 4. 4. All row columns which definition has the constraint clause present will have that constraint checked. If any constraint violation is detected, the overall operation fails and no changes to the table are made. Delete from statements remove rows from a table, which must exist. For example If the WHERE clause is not present then all rows are removed and the statement is equivalent to the TRUNCATE TABLE statement. Drop index statements remove indices from the DB. The index must exist. For example The optional IF EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the index does not exist. Drop table statements remove tables from the DB. The table must exist. For example The optional IF EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the table does not exist. Insert into statements insert new rows into tables. New rows come from literal data, if using the VALUES clause, or are a result of select statement. In the later case the select statement is fully evaluated before the insertion of any rows is performed, allowing to insert values calculated from the same table rows are to be inserted into. If the ColumnNameList part is omitted then the number of values inserted in the row must be the same as are columns in the table. If the ColumnNameList part is present then the number of values per row must be same as the same number of column names. All other columns of the record are set to NULL. The type of the value assigned to a column must be the same as is the column's type or the value must be NULL. For example If any of the columns of the table were defined using the optional constraints clause or the optional defaults clause then those are processed on a per row basis. The details are discussed in the "Constraints and defaults" chapter below the CREATE TABLE statement documentation. Explain statement produces a recordset consisting of lines of text which describe the execution plan of a statement, if any. For example, the QL tool treats the explain statement specially and outputs the joined lines: The explanation may aid in uderstanding how a statement/query would be executed and if indices are used as expected - or which indices may possibly improve the statement performance. The create index statements above were directly copy/pasted in the terminal from the suggestions provided by the filter recordset pipeline part returned by the explain statement. If the statement has nothing special in its plan, the result is the original statement. To get an explanation of the select statement of the IN predicate, use the EXPLAIN statement with that particular select statement. The rollback statement closes the innermost transaction nesting level discarding any updates to the DB made by it. If that's the outermost level then the effects on the DB are as if the transaction never happened. For example The (temporary) record set from the last statement is returned and can be processed by the client. In this case the rollback is the same as 'DROP TABLE tmp;' but it can be a more complex operation. Select from statements produce recordsets. The optional DISTINCT modifier ensures all rows in the result recordset are unique. Either all of the resulting fields are returned ('*') or only those named in FieldList. RecordSetList is a list of table names or parenthesized select statements, optionally (re)named using the AS clause. The result can be filtered using a WhereClause and orderd by the OrderBy clause. For example If Recordset is a nested, parenthesized SelectStmt then it must be given a name using the AS clause if its field are to be accessible in expressions. A field is an named expression. Identifiers, not used as a type in conversion or a function name in the Call clause, denote names of (other) fields, values of which should be used in the expression. The expression can be named using the AS clause. If the AS clause is not present and the expression consists solely of a field name, then that field name is used as the name of the resulting field. Otherwise the field is unnamed. For example The SELECT statement can optionally enumerate the desired/resulting fields in a list. No two identical field names can appear in the list. When more than one record set is used in the FROM clause record set list, the result record set field names are rewritten to be qualified using the record set names. If a particular record set doesn't have a name, its respective fields became unnamed. The optional JOIN clause, for example is mostly equal to except that the rows from a which, when they appear in the cross join, never made expr to evaluate to true, are combined with a virtual row from b, containing all nulls, and added to the result set. For the RIGHT JOIN variant the discussed rules are used for rows from b not satisfying expr == true and the virtual, all-null row "comes" from a. The FULL JOIN adds the respective rows which would be otherwise provided by the separate executions of the LEFT JOIN and RIGHT JOIN variants. For more thorough OUTER JOIN discussion please see the Wikipedia article at [10]. Resultins rows of a SELECT statement can be optionally ordered by the ORDER BY clause. Collating proceeds by considering the expressions in the expression list left to right until a collating order is determined. Any possibly remaining expressions are not evaluated. All of the expression values must yield an ordered type or NULL. Ordered types are defined in "Comparison operators". Collating of elements having a NULL value is different compared to what the comparison operators yield in expression evaluation (NULL result instead of a boolean value). Below, T denotes a non NULL value of any QL type. NULL collates before any non NULL value (is considered smaller than T). Two NULLs have no collating order (are considered equal). The WHERE clause restricts records considered by some statements, like SELECT FROM, DELETE FROM, or UPDATE. It is an error if the expression evaluates to a non null value of non bool type. The GROUP BY clause is used to project rows having common values into a smaller set of rows. For example Using the GROUP BY without any aggregate functions in the selected fields is in certain cases equal to using the DISTINCT modifier. The last two examples above produce the same resultsets. The optional OFFSET clause allows to ignore first N records. For example The above will produce only rows 11, 12, ... of the record set, if they exist. The value of the expression must a non negative integer, but not bigint or duration. The optional LIMIT clause allows to ignore all but first N records. For example The above will return at most the first 10 records of the record set. The value of the expression must a non negative integer, but not bigint or duration. The LIMIT and OFFSET clauses can be combined. For example Considering table t has, say 10 records, the above will produce only records 4 - 8. After returning record #8, no more result rows/records are computed. 1. The FROM clause is evaluated, producing a Cartesian product of its source record sets (tables or nested SELECT statements). 2. If present, the JOIN cluase is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation and the recordset specified by the JOIN clause. (... JOIN Recordset ON ...) 3. If present, the WHERE clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation. 4. If present, the GROUP BY clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 5. The SELECT field expressions are evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 6. If present, the DISTINCT modifier is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 7. If present, the ORDER BY clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 8. If present, the OFFSET clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). The offset expression is evaluated once for the first record produced by the previous evaluations. 9. If present, the LIMIT clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). The limit expression is evaluated once for the first record produced by the previous evaluations. Truncate table statements remove all records from a table. The table must exist. For example Update statements change values of fields in rows of a table. For example Note: The SET clause is optional. If any of the columns of the table were defined using the optional constraints clause or the optional defaults clause then those are processed on a per row basis. The details are discussed in the "Constraints and defaults" chapter below the CREATE TABLE statement documentation. To allow to query for DB meta data, there exist specially named tables, some of them being virtual. Note: Virtual system tables may have fake table-wise unique but meaningless and unstable record IDs. Do not apply the built-in id() to any system table. The table __Table lists all tables in the DB. The schema is The Schema column returns the statement to (re)create table Name. This table is virtual. The table __Colum lists all columns of all tables in the DB. The schema is The Ordinal column defines the 1-based index of the column in the record. This table is virtual. The table __Colum2 lists all columns of all tables in the DB which have the constraint NOT NULL or which have a constraint expression defined or which have a default expression defined. The schema is It's possible to obtain a consolidated recordset for all properties of all DB columns using The Name column is the column name in TableName. The table __Index lists all indices in the DB. The schema is The IsUnique columns reflects if the index was created using the optional UNIQUE clause. This table is virtual. Built-in functions are predeclared. The built-in aggregate function avg returns the average of values of an expression. Avg ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if avg is applied to an empty record set. The column values must be of a numeric type. The built-in function contains returns true if substr is within s. If any argument to contains is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in aggregate function count returns how many times an expression has a non NULL values or the number of rows in a record set. Note: count() returns 0 for an empty record set. For example Date returns the time corresponding to in the appropriate zone for that time in the given location. The month, day, hour, min, sec, and nsec values may be outside their usual ranges and will be normalized during the conversion. For example, October 32 converts to November 1. A daylight savings time transition skips or repeats times. For example, in the United States, March 13, 2011 2:15am never occurred, while November 6, 2011 1:15am occurred twice. In such cases, the choice of time zone, and therefore the time, is not well-defined. Date returns a time that is correct in one of the two zones involved in the transition, but it does not guarantee which. A location maps time instants to the zone in use at that time. Typically, the location represents the collection of time offsets in use in a geographical area, such as "CEST" and "CET" for central Europe. "local" represents the system's local time zone. "UTC" represents Universal Coordinated Time (UTC). The month specifies a month of the year (January = 1, ...). If any argument to date is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function day returns the day of the month specified by t. If the argument to day is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function formatTime returns a textual representation of the time value formatted according to layout, which defines the format by showing how the reference time, would be displayed if it were the value; it serves as an example of the desired output. The same display rules will then be applied to the time value. If any argument to formatTime is NULL the result is NULL. NOTE: The string value of the time zone, like "CET" or "ACDT", is dependent on the time zone of the machine the function is run on. For example, if the t value is in "CET", but the machine is in "ACDT", instead of "CET" the result is "+0100". This is the same what Go (time.Time).String() returns and in fact formatTime directly calls t.String(). returns on a machine in the CET time zone, but may return on a machine in the ACDT zone. The time value is in both cases the same so its ordering and comparing is correct. Only the display value can differ. The built-in functions formatFloat and formatInt format numbers to strings using go's number format functions in the `strconv` package. For all three functions, only the first argument is mandatory. The default values of the rest are shown in the examples. If the first argument is NULL, the result is NULL. returns returns returns Unlike the `strconv` equivalent, the formatInt function handles all integer types, both signed and unsigned. The built-in function hasPrefix tests whether the string s begins with prefix. If any argument to hasPrefix is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function hasSuffix tests whether the string s ends with suffix. If any argument to hasSuffix is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function hour returns the hour within the day specified by t, in the range [0, 23]. If the argument to hour is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function hours returns the duration as a floating point number of hours. If the argument to hours is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function id takes zero or one arguments. If no argument is provided, id() returns a table-unique automatically assigned numeric identifier of type int. Ids of deleted records are not reused unless the DB becomes completely empty (has no tables). For example If id() without arguments is called for a row which is not a table record then the result value is NULL. For example If id() has one argument it must be a table name of a table in a cross join. For example The built-in function len takes a string argument and returns the lentgh of the string in bytes. The expression len(s) is constant if s is a string constant. If the argument to len is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in aggregate function max returns the largest value of an expression in a record set. Max ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if max is applied to an empty record set. The expression values must be of an ordered type. For example The built-in aggregate function min returns the smallest value of an expression in a record set. Min ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if min is applied to an empty record set. For example The column values must be of an ordered type. The built-in function minute returns the minute offset within the hour specified by t, in the range [0, 59]. If the argument to minute is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function minutes returns the duration as a floating point number of minutes. If the argument to minutes is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function month returns the month of the year specified by t (January = 1, ...). If the argument to month is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function nanosecond returns the nanosecond offset within the second specified by t, in the range [0, 999999999]. If the argument to nanosecond is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function nanoseconds returns the duration as an integer nanosecond count. If the argument to nanoseconds is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function now returns the current local time. The built-in function parseTime parses a formatted string and returns the time value it represents. The layout defines the format by showing how the reference time, would be interpreted if it were the value; it serves as an example of the input format. The same interpretation will then be made to the input string. Elements omitted from the value are assumed to be zero or, when zero is impossible, one, so parsing "3:04pm" returns the time corresponding to Jan 1, year 0, 15:04:00 UTC (note that because the year is 0, this time is before the zero Time). Years must be in the range 0000..9999. The day of the week is checked for syntax but it is otherwise ignored. In the absence of a time zone indicator, parseTime returns a time in UTC. When parsing a time with a zone offset like -0700, if the offset corresponds to a time zone used by the current location, then parseTime uses that location and zone in the returned time. Otherwise it records the time as being in a fabricated location with time fixed at the given zone offset. When parsing a time with a zone abbreviation like MST, if the zone abbreviation has a defined offset in the current location, then that offset is used. The zone abbreviation "UTC" is recognized as UTC regardless of location. If the zone abbreviation is unknown, Parse records the time as being in a fabricated location with the given zone abbreviation and a zero offset. This choice means that such a time can be parses and reformatted with the same layout losslessly, but the exact instant used in the representation will differ by the actual zone offset. To avoid such problems, prefer time layouts that use a numeric zone offset. If any argument to parseTime is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function second returns the second offset within the minute specified by t, in the range [0, 59]. If the argument to second is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function seconds returns the duration as a floating point number of seconds. If the argument to seconds is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function since returns the time elapsed since t. It is shorthand for now()-t. If the argument to since is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in aggregate function sum returns the sum of values of an expression for all rows of a record set. Sum ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if sum is applied to an empty record set. The column values must be of a numeric type. The built-in function timeIn returns t with the location information set to loc. For discussion of the loc argument please see date(). If any argument to timeIn is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function weekday returns the day of the week specified by t. Sunday == 0, Monday == 1, ... If the argument to weekday is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function year returns the year in which t occurs. If the argument to year is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function yearDay returns the day of the year specified by t, in the range [1,365] for non-leap years, and [1,366] in leap years. If the argument to yearDay is NULL the result is NULL. Three functions assemble and disassemble complex numbers. The built-in function complex constructs a complex value from a floating-point real and imaginary part, while real and imag extract the real and imaginary parts of a complex value. The type of the arguments and return value correspond. For complex, the two arguments must be of the same floating-point type and the return type is the complex type with the corresponding floating-point constituents: complex64 for float32, complex128 for float64. The real and imag functions together form the inverse, so for a complex value z, z == complex(real(z), imag(z)). If the operands of these functions are all constants, the return value is a constant. If any argument to any of complex, real, imag functions is NULL the result is NULL. For the numeric types, the following sizes are guaranteed Portions of this specification page are modifications based on work[2] created and shared by Google[3] and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License[4]. This specification is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, and code is licensed under a BSD license[5]. Links from the above documentation This section is not part of the specification. WARNING: The implementation of indices is new and it surely needs more time to become mature. Indices are used currently used only by the WHERE clause. The following expression patterns of 'WHERE expression' are recognized and trigger index use. The relOp is one of the relation operators <, <=, ==, >=, >. For the equality operator both operands must be of comparable types. For all other operators both operands must be of ordered types. The constant expression is a compile time constant expression. Some constant folding is still a TODO. Parameter is a QL parameter ($1 etc.). Consider tables t and u, both with an indexed field f. The WHERE expression doesn't comply with the above simple detected cases. However, such query is now automatically rewritten to which will use both of the indices. The impact of using the indices can be substantial (cf. BenchmarkCrossJoin*) if the resulting rows have low "selectivity", ie. only few rows from both tables are selected by the respective WHERE filtering. Note: Existing QL DBs can be used and indices can be added to them. However, once any indices are present in the DB, the old QL versions cannot work with such DB anymore. Running a benchmark with -v (-test.v) outputs information about the scale used to report records/s and a brief description of the benchmark. For example Running the full suite of benchmarks takes a lot of time. Use the -timeout flag to avoid them being killed after the default time limit (10 minutes).
Package ql implements a pure Go embedded SQL database engine. QL is a member of the SQL family of languages. It is less complex and less powerful than SQL (whichever specification SQL is considered to be). 2017-01-10: Release v1.1.0 fixes some bugs and adds a configurable WAL headroom. 2016-07-29: Release v1.0.6 enables alternatively using = instead of == for equality operation. 2016-07-11: Release v1.0.5 undoes vendoring of lldb. QL now uses stable lldb (github.com/cznic/lldb). 2016-07-06: Release v1.0.4 fixes a panic when closing the WAL file. 2016-04-03: Release v1.0.3 fixes a data race. 2016-03-23: Release v1.0.2 vendors github.com/cznic/exp/lldb and github.com/camlistore/go4/lock. 2016-03-17: Release v1.0.1 adjusts for latest goyacc. Parser error messages are improved and changed, but their exact form is not considered a API change. 2016-03-05: The current version has been tagged v1.0.0. 2015-06-15: To improve compatibility with other SQL implementations, the count built-in aggregate function now accepts * as its argument. 2015-05-29: The execution planner was rewritten from scratch. It should use indices in all places where they were used before plus in some additional situations. It is possible to investigate the plan using the newly added EXPLAIN statement. The QL tool is handy for such analysis. If the planner would have used an index, but no such exists, the plan includes hints in form of copy/paste ready CREATE INDEX statements. The planner is still quite simple and a lot of work on it is yet ahead. You can help this process by filling an issue with a schema and query which fails to use an index or indices when it should, in your opinion. Bonus points for including output of `ql 'explain <query>'`. 2015-05-09: The grammar of the CREATE INDEX statement now accepts an expression list instead of a single expression, which was further limited to just a column name or the built-in id(). As a side effect, composite indices are now functional. However, the values in the expression-list style index are not yet used by other statements or the statement/query planner. The composite index is useful while having UNIQUE clause to check for semantically duplicate rows before they get added to the table or when such a row is mutated using the UPDATE statement and the expression-list style index tuple of the row is thus recomputed. 2015-05-02: The Schema field of table __Table now correctly reflects any column constraints and/or defaults. Also, the (*DB).Info method now has that information provided in new ColumInfo fields NotNull, Constraint and Default. 2015-04-20: Added support for {LEFT,RIGHT,FULL} [OUTER] JOIN. 2015-04-18: Column definitions can now have constraints and defaults. Details are discussed in the "Constraints and defaults" chapter below the CREATE TABLE statement documentation. 2015-03-06: New built-in functions formatFloat and formatInt. Thanks urandom! (https://github.com/urandom) 2015-02-16: IN predicate now accepts a SELECT statement. See the updated "Predicates" section. 2015-01-17: Logical operators || and && have now alternative spellings: OR and AND (case insensitive). AND was a keyword before, but OR is a new one. This can possibly break existing queries. For the record, it's a good idea to not use any name appearing in, for example, [7] in your queries as the list of QL's keywords may expand for gaining better compatibility with existing SQL "standards". 2015-01-12: ACID guarantees were tightened at the cost of performance in some cases. The write collecting window mechanism, a formerly used implementation detail, was removed. Inserting rows one by one in a transaction is now slow. I mean very slow. Try to avoid inserting single rows in a transaction. Instead, whenever possible, perform batch updates of tens to, say thousands of rows in a single transaction. See also: http://www.sqlite.org/faq.html#q19, the discussed synchronization principles involved are the same as for QL, modulo minor details. Note: A side effect is that closing a DB before exiting an application, both for the Go API and through database/sql driver, is no more required, strictly speaking. Beware that exiting an application while there is an open (uncommitted) transaction in progress means losing the transaction data. However, the DB will not become corrupted because of not closing it. Nor that was the case before, but formerly failing to close a DB could have resulted in losing the data of the last transaction. 2014-09-21: id() now optionally accepts a single argument - a table name. 2014-09-01: Added the DB.Flush() method and the LIKE pattern matching predicate. 2014-08-08: The built in functions max and min now accept also time values. Thanks opennota! (https://github.com/opennota) 2014-06-05: RecordSet interface extended by new methods FirstRow and Rows. 2014-06-02: Indices on id() are now used by SELECT statements. 2014-05-07: Introduction of Marshal, Schema, Unmarshal. 2014-04-15: Added optional IF NOT EXISTS clause to CREATE INDEX and optional IF EXISTS clause to DROP INDEX. 2014-04-12: The column Unique in the virtual table __Index was renamed to IsUnique because the old name is a keyword. Unfortunately, this is a breaking change, sorry. 2014-04-11: Introduction of LIMIT, OFFSET. 2014-04-10: Introduction of query rewriting. 2014-04-07: Introduction of indices. QL imports zappy[8], a block-based compressor, which speeds up its performance by using a C version of the compression/decompression algorithms. If a CGO-free (pure Go) version of QL, or an app using QL, is required, please include 'purego' in the -tags option of go {build,get,install}. For example: If zappy was installed before installing QL, it might be necessary to rebuild zappy first (or rebuild QL with all its dependencies using the -a option): The syntax is specified using Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF) Lower-case production names are used to identify lexical tokens. Non-terminals are in CamelCase. Lexical tokens are enclosed in double quotes "" or back quotes “. The form a … b represents the set of characters from a through b as alternatives. The horizontal ellipsis … is also used elsewhere in the spec to informally denote various enumerations or code snippets that are not further specified. QL source code is Unicode text encoded in UTF-8. The text is not canonicalized, so a single accented code point is distinct from the same character constructed from combining an accent and a letter; those are treated as two code points. For simplicity, this document will use the unqualified term character to refer to a Unicode code point in the source text. Each code point is distinct; for instance, upper and lower case letters are different characters. Implementation restriction: For compatibility with other tools, the parser may disallow the NUL character (U+0000) in the statement. Implementation restriction: A byte order mark is disallowed anywhere in QL statements. The following terms are used to denote specific character classes The underscore character _ (U+005F) is considered a letter. Lexical elements are comments, tokens, identifiers, keywords, operators and delimiters, integer, floating-point, imaginary, rune and string literals and QL parameters. Line comments start with the character sequence // or -- and stop at the end of the line. A line comment acts like a space. General comments start with the character sequence /* and continue through the character sequence */. A general comment acts like a space. Comments do not nest. Tokens form the vocabulary of QL. There are four classes: identifiers, keywords, operators and delimiters, and literals. White space, formed from spaces (U+0020), horizontal tabs (U+0009), carriage returns (U+000D), and newlines (U+000A), is ignored except as it separates tokens that would otherwise combine into a single token. The formal grammar uses semicolons ";" as separators of QL statements. A single QL statement or the last QL statement in a list of statements can have an optional semicolon terminator. (Actually a separator from the following empty statement.) Identifiers name entities such as tables or record set columns. An identifier is a sequence of one or more letters and digits. The first character in an identifier must be a letter. For example No identifiers are predeclared, however note that no keyword can be used as an identifier. Identifiers starting with two underscores are used for meta data virtual tables names. For forward compatibility, users should generally avoid using any identifiers starting with two underscores. For example The following keywords are reserved and may not be used as identifiers. Keywords are not case sensitive. The following character sequences represent operators, delimiters, and other special tokens Operators consisting of more than one character are referred to by names in the rest of the documentation An integer literal is a sequence of digits representing an integer constant. An optional prefix sets a non-decimal base: 0 for octal, 0x or 0X for hexadecimal. In hexadecimal literals, letters a-f and A-F represent values 10 through 15. For example A floating-point literal is a decimal representation of a floating-point constant. It has an integer part, a decimal point, a fractional part, and an exponent part. The integer and fractional part comprise decimal digits; the exponent part is an e or E followed by an optionally signed decimal exponent. One of the integer part or the fractional part may be elided; one of the decimal point or the exponent may be elided. For example An imaginary literal is a decimal representation of the imaginary part of a complex constant. It consists of a floating-point literal or decimal integer followed by the lower-case letter i. For example A rune literal represents a rune constant, an integer value identifying a Unicode code point. A rune literal is expressed as one or more characters enclosed in single quotes. Within the quotes, any character may appear except single quote and newline. A single quoted character represents the Unicode value of the character itself, while multi-character sequences beginning with a backslash encode values in various formats. The simplest form represents the single character within the quotes; since QL statements are Unicode characters encoded in UTF-8, multiple UTF-8-encoded bytes may represent a single integer value. For instance, the literal 'a' holds a single byte representing a literal a, Unicode U+0061, value 0x61, while 'ä' holds two bytes (0xc3 0xa4) representing a literal a-dieresis, U+00E4, value 0xe4. Several backslash escapes allow arbitrary values to be encoded as ASCII text. There are four ways to represent the integer value as a numeric constant: \x followed by exactly two hexadecimal digits; \u followed by exactly four hexadecimal digits; \U followed by exactly eight hexadecimal digits, and a plain backslash \ followed by exactly three octal digits. In each case the value of the literal is the value represented by the digits in the corresponding base. Although these representations all result in an integer, they have different valid ranges. Octal escapes must represent a value between 0 and 255 inclusive. Hexadecimal escapes satisfy this condition by construction. The escapes \u and \U represent Unicode code points so within them some values are illegal, in particular those above 0x10FFFF and surrogate halves. After a backslash, certain single-character escapes represent special values All other sequences starting with a backslash are illegal inside rune literals. For example A string literal represents a string constant obtained from concatenating a sequence of characters. There are two forms: raw string literals and interpreted string literals. Raw string literals are character sequences between back quotes “. Within the quotes, any character is legal except back quote. The value of a raw string literal is the string composed of the uninterpreted (implicitly UTF-8-encoded) characters between the quotes; in particular, backslashes have no special meaning and the string may contain newlines. Carriage returns inside raw string literals are discarded from the raw string value. Interpreted string literals are character sequences between double quotes "". The text between the quotes, which may not contain newlines, forms the value of the literal, with backslash escapes interpreted as they are in rune literals (except that \' is illegal and \" is legal), with the same restrictions. The three-digit octal (\nnn) and two-digit hexadecimal (\xnn) escapes represent individual bytes of the resulting string; all other escapes represent the (possibly multi-byte) UTF-8 encoding of individual characters. Thus inside a string literal \377 and \xFF represent a single byte of value 0xFF=255, while ÿ, \u00FF, \U000000FF and \xc3\xbf represent the two bytes 0xc3 0xbf of the UTF-8 encoding of character U+00FF. For example These examples all represent the same string If the statement source represents a character as two code points, such as a combining form involving an accent and a letter, the result will be an error if placed in a rune literal (it is not a single code point), and will appear as two code points if placed in a string literal. Literals are assigned their values from the respective text representation at "compile" (parse) time. QL parameters provide the same functionality as literals, but their value is assigned at execution time from an expression list passed to DB.Run or DB.Execute. Using '?' or '$' is completely equivalent. For example Keywords 'false' and 'true' (not case sensitive) represent the two possible constant values of type bool (also not case sensitive). Keyword 'NULL' (not case sensitive) represents an untyped constant which is assignable to any type. NULL is distinct from any other value of any type. A type determines the set of values and operations specific to values of that type. A type is specified by a type name. Named instances of the boolean, numeric, and string types are keywords. The names are not case sensitive. Note: The blob type is exchanged between the back end and the API as []byte. On 32 bit platforms this limits the size which the implementation can handle to 2G. A boolean type represents the set of Boolean truth values denoted by the predeclared constants true and false. The predeclared boolean type is bool. A duration type represents the elapsed time between two instants as an int64 nanosecond count. The representation limits the largest representable duration to approximately 290 years. A numeric type represents sets of integer or floating-point values. The predeclared architecture-independent numeric types are The value of an n-bit integer is n bits wide and represented using two's complement arithmetic. Conversions are required when different numeric types are mixed in an expression or assignment. A string type represents the set of string values. A string value is a (possibly empty) sequence of bytes. The case insensitive keyword for the string type is 'string'. The length of a string (its size in bytes) can be discovered using the built-in function len. A time type represents an instant in time with nanosecond precision. Each time has associated with it a location, consulted when computing the presentation form of the time. The following functions are implicitly declared An expression specifies the computation of a value by applying operators and functions to operands. Operands denote the elementary values in an expression. An operand may be a literal, a (possibly qualified) identifier denoting a constant or a function or a table/record set column, or a parenthesized expression. A qualified identifier is an identifier qualified with a table/record set name prefix. For example Primary expression are the operands for unary and binary expressions. For example A primary expression of the form denotes the element of a string indexed by x. Its type is byte. The value x is called the index. The following rules apply - The index x must be of integer type except bigint or duration; it is in range if 0 <= x < len(s), otherwise it is out of range. - A constant index must be non-negative and representable by a value of type int. - A constant index must be in range if the string a is a literal. - If x is out of range at run time, a run-time error occurs. - s[x] is the byte at index x and the type of s[x] is byte. If s is NULL or x is NULL then the result is NULL. Otherwise s[x] is illegal. For a string, the primary expression constructs a substring. The indices low and high select which elements appear in the result. The result has indices starting at 0 and length equal to high - low. For convenience, any of the indices may be omitted. A missing low index defaults to zero; a missing high index defaults to the length of the sliced operand The indices low and high are in range if 0 <= low <= high <= len(a), otherwise they are out of range. A constant index must be non-negative and representable by a value of type int. If both indices are constant, they must satisfy low <= high. If the indices are out of range at run time, a run-time error occurs. Integer values of type bigint or duration cannot be used as indices. If s is NULL the result is NULL. If low or high is not omitted and is NULL then the result is NULL. Given an identifier f denoting a predeclared function, calls f with arguments a1, a2, … an. Arguments are evaluated before the function is called. The type of the expression is the result type of f. In a function call, the function value and arguments are evaluated in the usual order. After they are evaluated, the parameters of the call are passed by value to the function and the called function begins execution. The return value of the function is passed by value when the function returns. Calling an undefined function causes a compile-time error. Operators combine operands into expressions. Comparisons are discussed elsewhere. For other binary operators, the operand types must be identical unless the operation involves shifts or untyped constants. For operations involving constants only, see the section on constant expressions. Except for shift operations, if one operand is an untyped constant and the other operand is not, the constant is converted to the type of the other operand. The right operand in a shift expression must have unsigned integer type or be an untyped constant that can be converted to unsigned integer type. If the left operand of a non-constant shift expression is an untyped constant, the type of the constant is what it would be if the shift expression were replaced by its left operand alone. Expressions of the form yield a boolean value true if expr2, a regular expression, matches expr1 (see also [6]). Both expression must be of type string. If any one of the expressions is NULL the result is NULL. Predicates are special form expressions having a boolean result type. Expressions of the form are equivalent, including NULL handling, to The types of involved expressions must be comparable as defined in "Comparison operators". Another form of the IN predicate creates the expression list from a result of a SelectStmt. The SelectStmt must select only one column. The produced expression list is resource limited by the memory available to the process. NULL values produced by the SelectStmt are ignored, but if all records of the SelectStmt are NULL the predicate yields NULL. The select statement is evaluated only once. If the type of expr is not the same as the type of the field returned by the SelectStmt then the set operation yields false. The type of the column returned by the SelectStmt must be one of the simple (non blob-like) types: Expressions of the form are equivalent, including NULL handling, to The types of involved expressions must be ordered as defined in "Comparison operators". Expressions of the form yield a boolean value true if expr does not have a specific type (case A) or if expr has a specific type (case B). In other cases the result is a boolean value false. Unary operators have the highest precedence. There are five precedence levels for binary operators. Multiplication operators bind strongest, followed by addition operators, comparison operators, && (logical AND), and finally || (logical OR) Binary operators of the same precedence associate from left to right. For instance, x / y * z is the same as (x / y) * z. Note that the operator precedence is reflected explicitly by the grammar. Arithmetic operators apply to numeric values and yield a result of the same type as the first operand. The four standard arithmetic operators (+, -, *, /) apply to integer, rational, floating-point, and complex types; + also applies to strings; +,- also applies to times. All other arithmetic operators apply to integers only. sum integers, rationals, floats, complex values, strings difference integers, rationals, floats, complex values, times product integers, rationals, floats, complex values / quotient integers, rationals, floats, complex values % remainder integers & bitwise AND integers | bitwise OR integers ^ bitwise XOR integers &^ bit clear (AND NOT) integers << left shift integer << unsigned integer >> right shift integer >> unsigned integer Strings can be concatenated using the + operator String addition creates a new string by concatenating the operands. A value of type duration can be added to or subtracted from a value of type time. Times can subtracted from each other producing a value of type duration. For two integer values x and y, the integer quotient q = x / y and remainder r = x % y satisfy the following relationships with x / y truncated towards zero ("truncated division"). As an exception to this rule, if the dividend x is the most negative value for the int type of x, the quotient q = x / -1 is equal to x (and r = 0). If the divisor is a constant expression, it must not be zero. If the divisor is zero at run time, a run-time error occurs. If the dividend is non-negative and the divisor is a constant power of 2, the division may be replaced by a right shift, and computing the remainder may be replaced by a bitwise AND operation The shift operators shift the left operand by the shift count specified by the right operand. They implement arithmetic shifts if the left operand is a signed integer and logical shifts if it is an unsigned integer. There is no upper limit on the shift count. Shifts behave as if the left operand is shifted n times by 1 for a shift count of n. As a result, x << 1 is the same as x*2 and x >> 1 is the same as x/2 but truncated towards negative infinity. For integer operands, the unary operators +, -, and ^ are defined as follows For floating-point and complex numbers, +x is the same as x, while -x is the negation of x. The result of a floating-point or complex division by zero is not specified beyond the IEEE-754 standard; whether a run-time error occurs is implementation-specific. Whenever any operand of any arithmetic operation, unary or binary, is NULL, as well as in the case of the string concatenating operation, the result is NULL. For unsigned integer values, the operations +, -, *, and << are computed modulo 2n, where n is the bit width of the unsigned integer's type. Loosely speaking, these unsigned integer operations discard high bits upon overflow, and expressions may rely on “wrap around”. For signed integers with a finite bit width, the operations +, -, *, and << may legally overflow and the resulting value exists and is deterministically defined by the signed integer representation, the operation, and its operands. No exception is raised as a result of overflow. An evaluator may not optimize an expression under the assumption that overflow does not occur. For instance, it may not assume that x < x + 1 is always true. Integers of type bigint and rationals do not overflow but their handling is limited by the memory resources available to the program. Comparison operators compare two operands and yield a boolean value. In any comparison, the first operand must be of same type as is the second operand, or vice versa. The equality operators == and != apply to operands that are comparable. The ordering operators <, <=, >, and >= apply to operands that are ordered. These terms and the result of the comparisons are defined as follows - Boolean values are comparable. Two boolean values are equal if they are either both true or both false. - Complex values are comparable. Two complex values u and v are equal if both real(u) == real(v) and imag(u) == imag(v). - Integer values are comparable and ordered, in the usual way. Note that durations are integers. - Floating point values are comparable and ordered, as defined by the IEEE-754 standard. - Rational values are comparable and ordered, in the usual way. - String values are comparable and ordered, lexically byte-wise. - Time values are comparable and ordered. Whenever any operand of any comparison operation is NULL, the result is NULL. Note that slices are always of type string. Logical operators apply to boolean values and yield a boolean result. The right operand is evaluated conditionally. The truth tables for logical operations with NULL values Conversions are expressions of the form T(x) where T is a type and x is an expression that can be converted to type T. A constant value x can be converted to type T in any of these cases: - x is representable by a value of type T. - x is a floating-point constant, T is a floating-point type, and x is representable by a value of type T after rounding using IEEE 754 round-to-even rules. The constant T(x) is the rounded value. - x is an integer constant and T is a string type. The same rule as for non-constant x applies in this case. Converting a constant yields a typed constant as result. A non-constant value x can be converted to type T in any of these cases: - x has type T. - x's type and T are both integer or floating point types. - x's type and T are both complex types. - x is an integer, except bigint or duration, and T is a string type. Specific rules apply to (non-constant) conversions between numeric types or to and from a string type. These conversions may change the representation of x and incur a run-time cost. All other conversions only change the type but not the representation of x. A conversion of NULL to any type yields NULL. For the conversion of non-constant numeric values, the following rules apply 1. When converting between integer types, if the value is a signed integer, it is sign extended to implicit infinite precision; otherwise it is zero extended. It is then truncated to fit in the result type's size. For example, if v == uint16(0x10F0), then uint32(int8(v)) == 0xFFFFFFF0. The conversion always yields a valid value; there is no indication of overflow. 2. When converting a floating-point number to an integer, the fraction is discarded (truncation towards zero). 3. When converting an integer or floating-point number to a floating-point type, or a complex number to another complex type, the result value is rounded to the precision specified by the destination type. For instance, the value of a variable x of type float32 may be stored using additional precision beyond that of an IEEE-754 32-bit number, but float32(x) represents the result of rounding x's value to 32-bit precision. Similarly, x + 0.1 may use more than 32 bits of precision, but float32(x + 0.1) does not. In all non-constant conversions involving floating-point or complex values, if the result type cannot represent the value the conversion succeeds but the result value is implementation-dependent. 1. Converting a signed or unsigned integer value to a string type yields a string containing the UTF-8 representation of the integer. Values outside the range of valid Unicode code points are converted to "\uFFFD". 2. Converting a blob to a string type yields a string whose successive bytes are the elements of the blob. 3. Converting a value of a string type to a blob yields a blob whose successive elements are the bytes of the string. 4. Converting a value of a bigint type to a string yields a string containing the decimal decimal representation of the integer. 5. Converting a value of a string type to a bigint yields a bigint value containing the integer represented by the string value. A prefix of “0x” or “0X” selects base 16; the “0” prefix selects base 8, and a “0b” or “0B” prefix selects base 2. Otherwise the value is interpreted in base 10. An error occurs if the string value is not in any valid format. 6. Converting a value of a rational type to a string yields a string containing the decimal decimal representation of the rational in the form "a/b" (even if b == 1). 7. Converting a value of a string type to a bigrat yields a bigrat value containing the rational represented by the string value. The string can be given as a fraction "a/b" or as a floating-point number optionally followed by an exponent. An error occurs if the string value is not in any valid format. 8. Converting a value of a duration type to a string returns a string representing the duration in the form "72h3m0.5s". Leading zero units are omitted. As a special case, durations less than one second format using a smaller unit (milli-, micro-, or nanoseconds) to ensure that the leading digit is non-zero. The zero duration formats as 0, with no unit. 9. Converting a string value to a duration yields a duration represented by the string. A duration string is a possibly signed sequence of decimal numbers, each with optional fraction and a unit suffix, such as "300ms", "-1.5h" or "2h45m". Valid time units are "ns", "us" (or "µs"), "ms", "s", "m", "h". 10. Converting a time value to a string returns the time formatted using the format string When evaluating the operands of an expression or of function calls, operations are evaluated in lexical left-to-right order. For example, in the evaluation of the function calls and evaluation of c happen in the order h(), i(), j(), c. Floating-point operations within a single expression are evaluated according to the associativity of the operators. Explicit parentheses affect the evaluation by overriding the default associativity. In the expression x + (y + z) the addition y + z is performed before adding x. Statements control execution. The empty statement does nothing. Alter table statements modify existing tables. With the ADD clause it adds a new column to the table. The column must not exist. With the DROP clause it removes an existing column from a table. The column must exist and it must be not the only (last) column of the table. IOW, there cannot be a table with no columns. For example When adding a column to a table with existing data, the constraint clause of the ColumnDef cannot be used. Adding a constrained column to an empty table is fine. Begin transactions statements introduce a new transaction level. Every transaction level must be eventually balanced by exactly one of COMMIT or ROLLBACK statements. Note that when a transaction is roll-backed because of a statement failure then no explicit balancing of the respective BEGIN TRANSACTION is statement is required nor permitted. Failure to properly balance any opened transaction level may cause dead locks and/or lose of data updated in the uppermost opened but never properly closed transaction level. For example A database cannot be updated (mutated) outside of a transaction. Statements requiring a transaction A database is effectively read only outside of a transaction. Statements not requiring a transaction The commit statement closes the innermost transaction nesting level. If that's the outermost level then the updates to the DB made by the transaction are atomically made persistent. For example Create index statements create new indices. Index is a named projection of ordered values of a table column to the respective records. As a special case the id() of the record can be indexed. Index name must not be the same as any of the existing tables and it also cannot be the same as of any column name of the table the index is on. For example Now certain SELECT statements may use the indices to speed up joins and/or to speed up record set filtering when the WHERE clause is used; or the indices might be used to improve the performance when the ORDER BY clause is present. The UNIQUE modifier requires the indexed values tuple to be index-wise unique or have all values NULL. The optional IF NOT EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the index already exists. A simple index consists of only one expression which must be either a column name or the built-in id(). A more complex and more general index is one that consists of more than one expression or its single expression does not qualify as a simple index. In this case the type of all expressions in the list must be one of the non blob-like types. Note: Blob-like types are blob, bigint, bigrat, time and duration. Create table statements create new tables. A column definition declares the column name and type. Table names and column names are case sensitive. Neither a table or an index of the same name may exist in the DB. For example The optional IF NOT EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the table already exists. The optional constraint clause has two forms. The first one is found in many SQL dialects. This form prevents the data in column DepartmentName to be NULL. The second form allows an arbitrary boolean expression to be used to validate the column. If the value of the expression is true then the validation succeeded. If the value of the expression is false or NULL then the validation fails. If the value of the expression is not of type bool an error occurs. The optional DEFAULT clause is an expression which, if present, is substituted instead of a NULL value when the colum is assigned a value. Note that the constraint and/or default expressions may refer to other columns by name: When a table row is inserted by the INSERT INTO statement or when a table row is updated by the UPDATE statement, the order of operations is as follows: 1. The new values of the affected columns are set and the values of all the row columns become the named values which can be referred to in default expressions evaluated in step 2. 2. If any row column value is NULL and the DEFAULT clause is present in the column's definition, the default expression is evaluated and its value is set as the respective column value. 3. The values, potentially updated, of row columns become the named values which can be referred to in constraint expressions evaluated during step 4. 4. All row columns which definition has the constraint clause present will have that constraint checked. If any constraint violation is detected, the overall operation fails and no changes to the table are made. Delete from statements remove rows from a table, which must exist. For example If the WHERE clause is not present then all rows are removed and the statement is equivalent to the TRUNCATE TABLE statement. Drop index statements remove indices from the DB. The index must exist. For example The optional IF EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the index does not exist. Drop table statements remove tables from the DB. The table must exist. For example The optional IF EXISTS clause makes the statement a no operation if the table does not exist. Insert into statements insert new rows into tables. New rows come from literal data, if using the VALUES clause, or are a result of select statement. In the later case the select statement is fully evaluated before the insertion of any rows is performed, allowing to insert values calculated from the same table rows are to be inserted into. If the ColumnNameList part is omitted then the number of values inserted in the row must be the same as are columns in the table. If the ColumnNameList part is present then the number of values per row must be same as the same number of column names. All other columns of the record are set to NULL. The type of the value assigned to a column must be the same as is the column's type or the value must be NULL. For example If any of the columns of the table were defined using the optional constraints clause or the optional defaults clause then those are processed on a per row basis. The details are discussed in the "Constraints and defaults" chapter below the CREATE TABLE statement documentation. Explain statement produces a recordset consisting of lines of text which describe the execution plan of a statement, if any. For example, the QL tool treats the explain statement specially and outputs the joined lines: The explanation may aid in uderstanding how a statement/query would be executed and if indices are used as expected - or which indices may possibly improve the statement performance. The create index statements above were directly copy/pasted in the terminal from the suggestions provided by the filter recordset pipeline part returned by the explain statement. If the statement has nothing special in its plan, the result is the original statement. To get an explanation of the select statement of the IN predicate, use the EXPLAIN statement with that particular select statement. The rollback statement closes the innermost transaction nesting level discarding any updates to the DB made by it. If that's the outermost level then the effects on the DB are as if the transaction never happened. For example The (temporary) record set from the last statement is returned and can be processed by the client. In this case the rollback is the same as 'DROP TABLE tmp;' but it can be a more complex operation. Select from statements produce recordsets. The optional DISTINCT modifier ensures all rows in the result recordset are unique. Either all of the resulting fields are returned ('*') or only those named in FieldList. RecordSetList is a list of table names or parenthesized select statements, optionally (re)named using the AS clause. The result can be filtered using a WhereClause and orderd by the OrderBy clause. For example If Recordset is a nested, parenthesized SelectStmt then it must be given a name using the AS clause if its field are to be accessible in expressions. A field is an named expression. Identifiers, not used as a type in conversion or a function name in the Call clause, denote names of (other) fields, values of which should be used in the expression. The expression can be named using the AS clause. If the AS clause is not present and the expression consists solely of a field name, then that field name is used as the name of the resulting field. Otherwise the field is unnamed. For example The SELECT statement can optionally enumerate the desired/resulting fields in a list. No two identical field names can appear in the list. When more than one record set is used in the FROM clause record set list, the result record set field names are rewritten to be qualified using the record set names. If a particular record set doesn't have a name, its respective fields became unnamed. The optional JOIN clause, for example is mostly equal to except that the rows from a which, when they appear in the cross join, never made expr to evaluate to true, are combined with a virtual row from b, containing all nulls, and added to the result set. For the RIGHT JOIN variant the discussed rules are used for rows from b not satisfying expr == true and the virtual, all-null row "comes" from a. The FULL JOIN adds the respective rows which would be otherwise provided by the separate executions of the LEFT JOIN and RIGHT JOIN variants. For more thorough OUTER JOIN discussion please see the Wikipedia article at [10]. Resultins rows of a SELECT statement can be optionally ordered by the ORDER BY clause. Collating proceeds by considering the expressions in the expression list left to right until a collating order is determined. Any possibly remaining expressions are not evaluated. All of the expression values must yield an ordered type or NULL. Ordered types are defined in "Comparison operators". Collating of elements having a NULL value is different compared to what the comparison operators yield in expression evaluation (NULL result instead of a boolean value). Below, T denotes a non NULL value of any QL type. NULL collates before any non NULL value (is considered smaller than T). Two NULLs have no collating order (are considered equal). The WHERE clause restricts records considered by some statements, like SELECT FROM, DELETE FROM, or UPDATE. It is an error if the expression evaluates to a non null value of non bool type. The GROUP BY clause is used to project rows having common values into a smaller set of rows. For example Using the GROUP BY without any aggregate functions in the selected fields is in certain cases equal to using the DISTINCT modifier. The last two examples above produce the same resultsets. The optional OFFSET clause allows to ignore first N records. For example The above will produce only rows 11, 12, ... of the record set, if they exist. The value of the expression must a non negative integer, but not bigint or duration. The optional LIMIT clause allows to ignore all but first N records. For example The above will return at most the first 10 records of the record set. The value of the expression must a non negative integer, but not bigint or duration. The LIMIT and OFFSET clauses can be combined. For example Considering table t has, say 10 records, the above will produce only records 4 - 8. After returning record #8, no more result rows/records are computed. 1. The FROM clause is evaluated, producing a Cartesian product of its source record sets (tables or nested SELECT statements). 2. If present, the JOIN cluase is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation and the recordset specified by the JOIN clause. (... JOIN Recordset ON ...) 3. If present, the WHERE clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation. 4. If present, the GROUP BY clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 5. The SELECT field expressions are evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 6. If present, the DISTINCT modifier is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 7. If present, the ORDER BY clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). 8. If present, the OFFSET clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). The offset expression is evaluated once for the first record produced by the previous evaluations. 9. If present, the LIMIT clause is evaluated on the result set of the previous evaluation(s). The limit expression is evaluated once for the first record produced by the previous evaluations. Truncate table statements remove all records from a table. The table must exist. For example Update statements change values of fields in rows of a table. For example Note: The SET clause is optional. If any of the columns of the table were defined using the optional constraints clause or the optional defaults clause then those are processed on a per row basis. The details are discussed in the "Constraints and defaults" chapter below the CREATE TABLE statement documentation. To allow to query for DB meta data, there exist specially named tables, some of them being virtual. Note: Virtual system tables may have fake table-wise unique but meaningless and unstable record IDs. Do not apply the built-in id() to any system table. The table __Table lists all tables in the DB. The schema is The Schema column returns the statement to (re)create table Name. This table is virtual. The table __Colum lists all columns of all tables in the DB. The schema is The Ordinal column defines the 1-based index of the column in the record. This table is virtual. The table __Colum2 lists all columns of all tables in the DB which have the constraint NOT NULL or which have a constraint expression defined or which have a default expression defined. The schema is It's possible to obtain a consolidated recordset for all properties of all DB columns using The Name column is the column name in TableName. The table __Index lists all indices in the DB. The schema is The IsUnique columns reflects if the index was created using the optional UNIQUE clause. This table is virtual. Built-in functions are predeclared. The built-in aggregate function avg returns the average of values of an expression. Avg ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if avg is applied to an empty record set. The column values must be of a numeric type. The built-in function contains returns true if substr is within s. If any argument to contains is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in aggregate function count returns how many times an expression has a non NULL values or the number of rows in a record set. Note: count() returns 0 for an empty record set. For example Date returns the time corresponding to in the appropriate zone for that time in the given location. The month, day, hour, min, sec, and nsec values may be outside their usual ranges and will be normalized during the conversion. For example, October 32 converts to November 1. A daylight savings time transition skips or repeats times. For example, in the United States, March 13, 2011 2:15am never occurred, while November 6, 2011 1:15am occurred twice. In such cases, the choice of time zone, and therefore the time, is not well-defined. Date returns a time that is correct in one of the two zones involved in the transition, but it does not guarantee which. A location maps time instants to the zone in use at that time. Typically, the location represents the collection of time offsets in use in a geographical area, such as "CEST" and "CET" for central Europe. "local" represents the system's local time zone. "UTC" represents Universal Coordinated Time (UTC). The month specifies a month of the year (January = 1, ...). If any argument to date is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function day returns the day of the month specified by t. If the argument to day is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function formatTime returns a textual representation of the time value formatted according to layout, which defines the format by showing how the reference time, would be displayed if it were the value; it serves as an example of the desired output. The same display rules will then be applied to the time value. If any argument to formatTime is NULL the result is NULL. NOTE: The string value of the time zone, like "CET" or "ACDT", is dependent on the time zone of the machine the function is run on. For example, if the t value is in "CET", but the machine is in "ACDT", instead of "CET" the result is "+0100". This is the same what Go (time.Time).String() returns and in fact formatTime directly calls t.String(). returns on a machine in the CET time zone, but may return on a machine in the ACDT zone. The time value is in both cases the same so its ordering and comparing is correct. Only the display value can differ. The built-in functions formatFloat and formatInt format numbers to strings using go's number format functions in the `strconv` package. For all three functions, only the first argument is mandatory. The default values of the rest are shown in the examples. If the first argument is NULL, the result is NULL. returns returns returns Unlike the `strconv` equivalent, the formatInt function handles all integer types, both signed and unsigned. The built-in function hasPrefix tests whether the string s begins with prefix. If any argument to hasPrefix is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function hasSuffix tests whether the string s ends with suffix. If any argument to hasSuffix is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function hour returns the hour within the day specified by t, in the range [0, 23]. If the argument to hour is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function hours returns the duration as a floating point number of hours. If the argument to hours is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function id takes zero or one arguments. If no argument is provided, id() returns a table-unique automatically assigned numeric identifier of type int. Ids of deleted records are not reused unless the DB becomes completely empty (has no tables). For example If id() without arguments is called for a row which is not a table record then the result value is NULL. For example If id() has one argument it must be a table name of a table in a cross join. For example The built-in function len takes a string argument and returns the lentgh of the string in bytes. The expression len(s) is constant if s is a string constant. If the argument to len is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in aggregate function max returns the largest value of an expression in a record set. Max ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if max is applied to an empty record set. The expression values must be of an ordered type. For example The built-in aggregate function min returns the smallest value of an expression in a record set. Min ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if min is applied to an empty record set. For example The column values must be of an ordered type. The built-in function minute returns the minute offset within the hour specified by t, in the range [0, 59]. If the argument to minute is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function minutes returns the duration as a floating point number of minutes. If the argument to minutes is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function month returns the month of the year specified by t (January = 1, ...). If the argument to month is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function nanosecond returns the nanosecond offset within the second specified by t, in the range [0, 999999999]. If the argument to nanosecond is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function nanoseconds returns the duration as an integer nanosecond count. If the argument to nanoseconds is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function now returns the current local time. The built-in function parseTime parses a formatted string and returns the time value it represents. The layout defines the format by showing how the reference time, would be interpreted if it were the value; it serves as an example of the input format. The same interpretation will then be made to the input string. Elements omitted from the value are assumed to be zero or, when zero is impossible, one, so parsing "3:04pm" returns the time corresponding to Jan 1, year 0, 15:04:00 UTC (note that because the year is 0, this time is before the zero Time). Years must be in the range 0000..9999. The day of the week is checked for syntax but it is otherwise ignored. In the absence of a time zone indicator, parseTime returns a time in UTC. When parsing a time with a zone offset like -0700, if the offset corresponds to a time zone used by the current location, then parseTime uses that location and zone in the returned time. Otherwise it records the time as being in a fabricated location with time fixed at the given zone offset. When parsing a time with a zone abbreviation like MST, if the zone abbreviation has a defined offset in the current location, then that offset is used. The zone abbreviation "UTC" is recognized as UTC regardless of location. If the zone abbreviation is unknown, Parse records the time as being in a fabricated location with the given zone abbreviation and a zero offset. This choice means that such a time can be parses and reformatted with the same layout losslessly, but the exact instant used in the representation will differ by the actual zone offset. To avoid such problems, prefer time layouts that use a numeric zone offset. If any argument to parseTime is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function second returns the second offset within the minute specified by t, in the range [0, 59]. If the argument to second is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function seconds returns the duration as a floating point number of seconds. If the argument to seconds is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function since returns the time elapsed since t. It is shorthand for now()-t. If the argument to since is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in aggregate function sum returns the sum of values of an expression for all rows of a record set. Sum ignores NULL values, but returns NULL if all values of a column are NULL or if sum is applied to an empty record set. The column values must be of a numeric type. The built-in function timeIn returns t with the location information set to loc. For discussion of the loc argument please see date(). If any argument to timeIn is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function weekday returns the day of the week specified by t. Sunday == 0, Monday == 1, ... If the argument to weekday is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function year returns the year in which t occurs. If the argument to year is NULL the result is NULL. The built-in function yearDay returns the day of the year specified by t, in the range [1,365] for non-leap years, and [1,366] in leap years. If the argument to yearDay is NULL the result is NULL. Three functions assemble and disassemble complex numbers. The built-in function complex constructs a complex value from a floating-point real and imaginary part, while real and imag extract the real and imaginary parts of a complex value. The type of the arguments and return value correspond. For complex, the two arguments must be of the same floating-point type and the return type is the complex type with the corresponding floating-point constituents: complex64 for float32, complex128 for float64. The real and imag functions together form the inverse, so for a complex value z, z == complex(real(z), imag(z)). If the operands of these functions are all constants, the return value is a constant. If any argument to any of complex, real, imag functions is NULL the result is NULL. For the numeric types, the following sizes are guaranteed Portions of this specification page are modifications based on work[2] created and shared by Google[3] and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License[4]. This specification is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, and code is licensed under a BSD license[5]. Links from the above documentation This section is not part of the specification. WARNING: The implementation of indices is new and it surely needs more time to become mature. Indices are used currently used only by the WHERE clause. The following expression patterns of 'WHERE expression' are recognized and trigger index use. The relOp is one of the relation operators <, <=, ==, >=, >. For the equality operator both operands must be of comparable types. For all other operators both operands must be of ordered types. The constant expression is a compile time constant expression. Some constant folding is still a TODO. Parameter is a QL parameter ($1 etc.). Consider tables t and u, both with an indexed field f. The WHERE expression doesn't comply with the above simple detected cases. However, such query is now automatically rewritten to which will use both of the indices. The impact of using the indices can be substantial (cf. BenchmarkCrossJoin*) if the resulting rows have low "selectivity", ie. only few rows from both tables are selected by the respective WHERE filtering. Note: Existing QL DBs can be used and indices can be added to them. However, once any indices are present in the DB, the old QL versions cannot work with such DB anymore. Running a benchmark with -v (-test.v) outputs information about the scale used to report records/s and a brief description of the benchmark. For example Running the full suite of benchmarks takes a lot of time. Use the -timeout flag to avoid them being killed after the default time limit (10 minutes).
Command mox is a modern, secure, full-featured, open source mail server for low-maintenance self-hosted email. Many commands talk to a running mox instance, through the ctl file in the data directory. Specify the configuration file (that holds the path to the data directory) through the -config flag or MOXCONF environment variable. Start mox, serving SMTP/IMAP/HTTPS. Incoming email is accepted over SMTP. Email can be retrieved by users using IMAP. HTTP listeners are started for the admin/account web interfaces, and for automated TLS configuration. Missing essential TLS certificates are immediately requested, other TLS certificates are requested on demand. Only implemented on unix systems, not Windows. Quickstart generates configuration files and prints instructions to quickly set up a mox instance. Quickstart writes configuration files, prints initial admin and account passwords, DNS records you should create. If you run it on Linux it writes a systemd service file and prints commands to enable and start mox as service. The user or uid is optional, defaults to "mox", and is the user or uid/gid mox will run as after initialization. Quickstart assumes mox will run on the machine you run quickstart on and uses its host name and public IPs. On many systems the hostname is not a fully qualified domain name, but only the first dns "label", e.g. "mail" in case of "mail.example.org". If so, quickstart does a reverse DNS lookup to find the hostname, and as fallback uses the label plus the domain of the email address you specified. Use flag -hostname to explicitly specify the hostname mox will run on. Mox is by far easiest to operate if you let it listen on port 443 (HTTPS) and 80 (HTTP). TLS will be fully automatic with ACME with Let's Encrypt. You can run mox along with an existing webserver, but because of MTA-STS and autoconfig, you'll need to forward HTTPS traffic for two domains to mox. Run "mox quickstart -existing-webserver ..." to generate configuration files and instructions for configuring mox along with an existing webserver. But please first consider configuring mox on port 443. It can itself serve domains with HTTP/HTTPS, including with automatic TLS with ACME, is easily configured through both configuration files and admin web interface, and can act as a reverse proxy (and static file server for that matter), so you can forward traffic to your existing backend applications. Look for "WebHandlers:" in the output of "mox config describe-domains" and see the output of "mox example webhandlers". Shut mox down, giving connections maximum 3 seconds to stop before closing them. While shutting down, new IMAP and SMTP connections will get a status response indicating temporary unavailability. Existing connections will get a 3 second period to finish their transaction and shut down. Under normal circumstances, only IMAP has long-living connections, with the IDLE command to get notified of new mail deliveries. Set new password an account. The password is read from stdin. Secrets derived from the password, but not the password itself, are stored in the account database. The stored secrets are for authentication with: scram-sha-256, scram-sha-1, cram-md5, plain text (bcrypt hash). The parameter is an account name, as configured under Accounts in domains.conf and as present in the data/accounts/ directory, not a configured email address for an account. Set a new admin password, for the web interface. The password is read from stdin. Its bcrypt hash is stored in a file named "adminpasswd" in the configuration directory. Print the log levels, or set a new default log level, or a level for the given package. By default, a single log level applies to all logging in mox. But for each "pkg", an overriding log level can be configured. Examples of packages: smtpserver, smtpclient, queue, imapserver, spf, dkim, dmarc, junk, message, etc. Specify a pkg and an empty level to clear the configured level for a package. Valid labels: error, info, debug, trace, traceauth, tracedata. List messages in the delivery queue. This prints the message with its ID, last and next delivery attempts, last error. Schedule matching messages in the queue for immediate delivery. Messages deliveries are normally attempted with exponential backoff. The first retry after 7.5 minutes, and doubling each time. Kicking messages sets their next scheduled attempt to now, it can cause delivery to fail earlier than without rescheduling. With the -transport flag, future delivery attempts are done using the specified transport. Transports can be configured in mox.conf, e.g. to submit to a remote queue over SMTP. Remove matching messages from the queue. Dangerous operation, this completely removes the message. If you want to store the message, use "queue dump" before removing. Dump a message from the queue. The message is printed to stdout and is in standard internet mail format. Import a maildir into an account. The mbox/maildir archive is accessed and imported by the running mox process, so it must have access to the archive files. The default suggested systemd service file isolates mox from most of the file system, with only the "data/" directory accessible, so you may want to put the mbox/maildir archive files in a directory like "data/import/" to make it available to mox. By default, messages will train the junk filter based on their flags and, if "automatic junk flags" configuration is set, based on mailbox naming. If the destination mailbox is the Sent mailbox, the recipients of the messages are added to the message metadata, causing later incoming messages from these recipients to be accepted, unless other reputation signals prevent that. Users can also import mailboxes/messages through the account web page by uploading a zip or tgz file with mbox and/or maildirs. Mailbox flags, like "seen", "answered", will be imported. An optional dovecot-keywords file can specify additional flags, like Forwarded/Junk/NotJunk. Import an mbox into an account. Using mbox is not recommended, maildir is a better defined format. The mbox/maildir archive is accessed and imported by the running mox process, so it must have access to the archive files. The default suggested systemd service file isolates mox from most of the file system, with only the "data/" directory accessible, so you may want to put the mbox/maildir archive files in a directory like "data/import/" to make it available to mox. By default, messages will train the junk filter based on their flags and, if "automatic junk flags" configuration is set, based on mailbox naming. If the destination mailbox is the Sent mailbox, the recipients of the messages are added to the message metadata, causing later incoming messages from these recipients to be accepted, unless other reputation signals prevent that. Users can also import mailboxes/messages through the account web page by uploading a zip or tgz file with mbox and/or maildirs. Export one or all mailboxes from an account in maildir format. Export bypasses a running mox instance. It opens the account mailbox/message database file directly. This may block if a running mox instance also has the database open, e.g. for IMAP connections. To export from a running instance, use the accounts web page. Export messages from one or all mailboxes in an account in mbox format. Using mbox is not recommended. Maildir is a better format. Export bypasses a running mox instance. It opens the account mailbox/message database file directly. This may block if a running mox instance also has the database open, e.g. for IMAP connections. To export from a running instance, use the accounts web page. For mbox export, "mboxrd" is used where message lines starting with the magic "From " string are escaped by prepending a >. All ">*From " are escaped, otherwise reconstructing the original could lose a ">". Start a local SMTP/IMAP server that accepts all messages, useful when testing/developing software that sends email. Localserve starts mox with a configuration suitable for local email-related software development/testing. It listens for SMTP/Submission(s), IMAP(s) and HTTP(s), on the regular port numbers + 1000. Data is stored in the system user's configuration directory under "mox-localserve", e.g. $HOME/.config/mox-localserve/ on linux, but can be overridden with the -dir flag. If the directory does not yet exist, it is automatically initialized with configuration files, an account with email address mox@localhost and password moxmoxmox, and a newly generated self-signed TLS certificate. All incoming email to any address is accepted (if checks pass), unless the recipient localpart ends with: - "temperror": fail with a temporary error code - "permerror": fail with a permanent error code - [45][0-9][0-9]: fail with the specific error code - "timeout": no response (for an hour) If the localpart begins with "mailfrom" or "rcptto", the error is returned during those commands instead of during "data". Prints help about matching commands. If multiple commands match, they are listed along with the first line of their help text. If a single command matches, its usage and full help text is printed. Creates a backup of the data directory. Backup creates consistent snapshots of the databases and message files and copies other files in the data directory. Empty directories are not copied. These files can then be stored elsewhere for long-term storage, or used to fall back to should an upgrade fail. Simply copying files in the data directory while mox is running can result in unusable database files. Message files never change (they are read-only, though can be removed) and are hard-linked so they don't consume additional space. If hardlinking fails, for example when the backup destination directory is on a different file system, a regular copy is made. Using a destination directory like "data/tmp/backup" increases the odds hardlinking succeeds: the default systemd service file specifically mounts the data directory, causing attempts to hardlink outside it to fail with an error about cross-device linking. All files in the data directory that aren't recognized (i.e. other than known database files, message files, an acme directory, the "tmp" directory, etc), are stored, but with a warning. A clean successful backup does not print any output by default. Use the -verbose flag for details, including timing. To restore a backup, first shut down mox, move away the old data directory and move an earlier backed up directory in its place, run "mox verifydata", possibly with the "-fix" option, and restart mox. After the restore, you may also want to run "mox bumpuidvalidity" for each account for which messages in a mailbox changed, to force IMAP clients to synchronize mailbox state. Before upgrading, to check if the upgrade will likely succeed, first make a backup, then use the new mox binary to run "mox verifydata" on the backup. This can change the backup files (e.g. upgrade database files, move away unrecognized message files), so you should make a new backup before actually upgrading. Verify the contents of a data directory, typically of a backup. Verifydata checks all database files to see if they are valid BoltDB/bstore databases. It checks that all messages in the database have a corresponding on-disk message file and there are no unrecognized files. If option -fix is specified, unrecognized message files are moved away. This may be needed after a restore, because messages enqueued or delivered in the future may get those message sequence numbers assigned and writing the message file would fail. Consistency of message/mailbox UID, UIDNEXT and UIDVALIDITY is verified as well. Because verifydata opens the database files, schema upgrades may automatically be applied. This can happen if you use a new mox release. It is useful to run "mox verifydata" with a new binary before attempting an upgrade, but only on a copy of the database files, as made with "mox backup". Before upgrading, make a new backup again since "mox verifydata" may have upgraded the database files, possibly making them potentially no longer readable by the previous version. Parses and validates the configuration files. If valid, the command exits with status 0. If not valid, all errors encountered are printed. Check the DNS records with the configuration for the domain, and print any errors/warnings. Prints annotated DNS records as zone file that should be created for the domain. The zone file can be imported into existing DNS software. You should review the DNS records, especially if your domain previously/currently has email configured. Prints an annotated empty configuration for use as domains.conf. The domains configuration file contains the domains and their configuration, and accounts and their configuration. This includes the configured email addresses. The mox admin web interface, and the mox command line interface, can make changes to this file. Mox automatically reloads this file when it changes. Like the static configuration, the example domains.conf printed by this command needs modifications to make it valid. Prints an annotated empty configuration for use as mox.conf. The static configuration file cannot be reloaded while mox is running. Mox has to be restarted for changes to the static configuration file to take effect. This configuration file needs modifications to make it valid. For example, it may contain unfinished list items. Add an account with an email address and reload the configuration. Email can be delivered to this address/account. A password has to be configured explicitly, see the setaccountpassword command. Remove an account and reload the configuration. Email addresses for this account will also be removed, and incoming email for these addresses will be rejected. Adds an address to an account and reloads the configuration. If address starts with a @ (i.e. a missing localpart), this is a catchall address for the domain. Remove an address and reload the configuration. Incoming email for this address will be rejected after removing an address. Adds a new domain to the configuration and reloads the configuration. The account is used for the postmaster mailboxes the domain, including as DMARC and TLS reporting. Localpart is the "username" at the domain for this account. If must be set if and only if account does not yet exist. Remove a domain from the configuration and reload the configuration. This is a dangerous operation. Incoming email delivery for this domain will be rejected. Describe configuration for mox when invoked as sendmail. Prints a systemd unit service file for mox. This is the same file as generated using quickstart. If the systemd service file has changed with a newer version of mox, use this command to generate an up to date version. Ensure host private keys exist for TLS listeners with ACME. In mox.conf, each listener can have TLS configured. Long-lived private key files can be specified, which will be used when requesting ACME certificates. Configuring these private keys makes it feasible to publish DANE TLSA records for the corresponding public keys in DNS, protected with DNSSEC, allowing TLS certificate verification without depending on a list of Certificate Authorities (CAs). Previous versions of mox did not pre-generate private keys for use with ACME certificates, but would generate private keys on-demand. By explicitly configuring private keys, they will not change automatedly with new certificates, and the DNS TLSA records stay valid. This command looks for listeners in mox.conf with TLS with ACME configured. For each missing host private key (of type rsa-2048 and ecdsa-p256) a key is written to config/hostkeys/. If a certificate exists in the ACME "cache", its private key is copied. Otherwise a new private key is generated. Snippets for manually updating/editing mox.conf are printed. After running this command, and updating mox.conf, run "mox config dnsrecords" for a domain and create the TLSA DNS records it suggests to enable DANE. List available examples, or print a specific example. Check if a newer version of mox is available. A single DNS TXT lookup to _updates.xmox.nl tells if a new version is available. If so, a changelog is fetched from https://updates.xmox.nl, and the individual entries verified with a builtin public key. The changelog is printed. Turn an ID from a Received header into a cid, for looking up in logs. A cid is essentially a connection counter initialized when mox starts. Each log line contains a cid. Received headers added by mox contain a unique ID that can be decrypted to a cid by admin of a mox instance only. Print the configuration for email clients for a domain. Sending email is typically not done on the SMTP port 25, but on submission ports 465 (with TLS) and 587 (without initial TLS, but usually added to the connection with STARTTLS). For IMAP, the port with TLS is 993 and without is 143. Without TLS/STARTTLS, passwords are sent in clear text, which should only be configured over otherwise secured connections, like a VPN. Dial the address using TLS with certificate verification using DANE. Data is copied between connection and stdin/stdout until either side closes the connection. Connect to MX server for domain using STARTTLS verified with DANE. If no destination host is specified, regular delivery logic is used to find the hosts to attempt delivery too. This involves following CNAMEs for the domain, looking up MX records, and possibly falling back to the domain name itself as host. If a destination host is specified, that is the only candidate host considered for dialing. With a list of destinations gathered, each is dialed until a successful SMTP session verified with DANE has been initialized, including EHLO and STARTTLS commands. Once connected, data is copied between connection and stdin/stdout, until either side closes the connection. This command follows the same logic as delivery attempts made from the queue, sharing most of its code. Print TLSA record for given certificate/key and parameters. Valid values: - usage: pkix-ta (0), pkix-ee (1), dane-ta (2), dane-ee (3) - selector: cert (0), spki (1) - matchtype: full (0), sha2-256 (1), sha2-512 (2) Common DANE TLSA record parameters are: dane-ee spki sha2-256, or 3 1 1, followed by a sha2-256 hash of the DER-encoded "SPKI" (subject public key info) from the certificate. An example DNS zone file entry: The first usable information from the pem file is used to compose the TLSA record. In case of selector "cert", a certificate is required. Otherwise the "subject public key info" (spki) of the first certificate or public or private key (pkcs#8, pkcs#1 or ec private key) is used. Lookup DNS name of given type. Lookup always prints whether the response was DNSSEC-protected. Examples: mox dns lookup ptr 1.1.1.1 mox dns lookup mx xmox.nl mox dns lookup txt _dmarc.xmox.nl. mox dns lookup tlsa _25._tcp.xmox.nl Generate a new ed25519 key for use with DKIM. Ed25519 keys are much smaller than RSA keys of comparable cryptographic strength. This is convenient because of maximum DNS message sizes. At the time of writing, not many mail servers appear to support ed25519 DKIM keys though, so it is recommended to sign messages with both RSA and ed25519 keys. Generate a new 2048 bit RSA private key for use with DKIM. The generated file is in PEM format, and has a comment it is generated for use with DKIM, by mox. Lookup and print the DKIM record for the selector at the domain. Print a DKIM DNS TXT record with the public key derived from the private key read from stdin. The DNS should be configured as a TXT record at $selector._domainkey.$domain. Verify the DKIM signatures in a message and print the results. The message is parsed, and the DKIM-Signature headers are validated. Validation of older messages may fail because the DNS records have been removed or changed by now, or because the signature header may have specified an expiration time that was passed. Sign a message, adding DKIM-Signature headers based on the domain in the From header. The message is parsed, the domain looked up in the configuration files, and DKIM-Signature headers generated. The message is printed with the DKIM-Signature headers prepended. Lookup dmarc policy for domain, a DNS TXT record at _dmarc.<domain>, validate and print it. Parse a DMARC report from an email message, and print its extracted details. DMARC reports are periodically mailed, if requested in the DMARC DNS record of a domain. Reports are sent by mail servers that received messages with our domain in a From header. This may or may not be legatimate email. DMARC reports contain summaries of evaluations of DMARC and DKIM/SPF, which can help understand email deliverability problems. Parse an email message and evaluate it against the DMARC policy of the domain in the From-header. mailfromaddress and helodomain are used for SPF validation. If both are empty, SPF validation is skipped. mailfromaddress should be the address used as MAIL FROM in the SMTP session. For DSN messages, that address may be empty. The helo domain was specified at the beginning of the SMTP transaction that delivered the message. These values can be found in message headers. For each reporting address in the domain's DMARC record, check if it has opted into receiving reports (if needed). A DMARC record can request reports about DMARC evaluations to be sent to an email/http address. If the organizational domains of that of the DMARC record and that of the report destination address do not match, the destination address must opt-in to receiving DMARC reports by creating a DMARC record at <dmarcdomain>._report._dmarc.<reportdestdomain>. Test if IP is in the DNS blocklist of the zone, e.g. bl.spamcop.net. If the IP is in the blocklist, an explanation is printed. This is typically a URL with more information. Check the health of the DNS blocklist represented by zone, e.g. bl.spamcop.net. The health of a DNS blocklist can be checked by querying for 127.0.0.1 and 127.0.0.2. The second must and the first must not be present. Lookup the MTASTS record and policy for the domain. MTA-STS is a mechanism for a domain to specify if it requires TLS connections for delivering email. If a domain has a valid MTA-STS DNS TXT record at _mta-sts.<domain> it signals it implements MTA-STS. A policy can then be fetched at https://mta-sts.<domain>/.well-known/mta-sts.txt. The policy specifies the mode (enforce, testing, none), which MX servers support TLS and should be used, and how long the policy can be cached. Recreate and retrain the junk filter for the account. Useful after having made changes to the junk filter configuration, or if the implementation has changed. Sendmail is a drop-in replacement for /usr/sbin/sendmail to deliver emails sent by unix processes like cron. If invoked as "sendmail", it will act as sendmail for sending messages. Its intention is to let processes like cron send emails. Messages are submitted to an actual mail server over SMTP. The destination mail server and credentials are configured in /etc/moxsubmit.conf, see mox config describe-sendmail. The From message header is rewritten to the configured address. When the addressee appears to be a local user, because without @, the message is sent to the configured default address. If submitting an email fails, it is added to a directory moxsubmit.failures in the user's home directory. Most flags are ignored to fake compatibility with other sendmail implementations. A single recipient or the -t flag with a To-header is required. With the -t flag, Cc and Bcc headers are not handled specially, so Bcc is not removed and the addresses do not receive the email. /etc/moxsubmit.conf should be group-readable and not readable by others and this binary should be setgid that group: Check the status of IP for the policy published in DNS for the domain. IPs may be allowed to send for a domain, or disallowed, and several shades in between. If not allowed, an explanation may be provided by the policy. If so, the explanation is printed. The SPF mechanism that matched (if any) is also printed. Lookup the SPF record for the domain and print it. Parse the record as SPF record. If valid, nothing is printed. Lookup the TLSRPT record for the domain. A TLSRPT record typically contains an email address where reports about TLS connectivity should be sent. Mail servers attempting delivery to our domain should attempt to use TLS. TLSRPT lets them report how many connection successfully used TLS, and how what kind of errors occurred otherwise. Parse and print the TLSRPT in the message. The report is printed in formatted JSON. Prints this mox version. Change the IMAP UID validity of the mailbox, causing IMAP clients to refetch messages. This can be useful after manually repairing metadata about the account/mailbox. Opens account database file directly. Ensure mox does not have the account open, or is not running. Reassign UIDs in one mailbox or all mailboxes in an account and bump UID validity, causing IMAP clients to refetch messages. Opens account database file directly. Ensure mox does not have the account open, or is not running. Fix inconsistent UIDVALIDITY and UIDNEXT in messages/mailboxes/account. The next UID to use for a message in a mailbox should always be higher than any existing message UID in the mailbox. If it is not, the mailbox UIDNEXT is updated. Each mailbox has a UIDVALIDITY sequence number, which should always be lower than the per-account next UIDVALIDITY to use. If it is not, the account next UIDVALIDITY is updated. Opens account database file directly. Ensure mox does not have the account open, or is not running. Ensure message sizes in the database matching the sum of the message prefix length and on-disk file size. Messages with an inconsistent size are also parsed again. If an inconsistency is found, you should probably also run "mox bumpuidvalidity" on the mailboxes or entire account to force IMAP clients to refetch messages. Can be useful after upgrading mox with improved message parsing. Messages are parsed in batches, so other access to the mailboxes/messages are not blocked while reparsing all messages. Ensure messages in the database have a pre-parsed MIME form in the database. Recalculate message counts for all mailboxes in the account, and total message size for quota. When a message is added to/removed from a mailbox, or when message flags change, the total, unread, unseen and deleted messages are accounted, the total size of the mailbox, and the total message size for the account. In case of a bug in this accounting, the numbers could become incorrect. This command will find, fix and print them. Parse message, print JSON representation. Reassign message threads. For all accounts, or optionally only the specified account. Threading for all messages in an account is first reset, and new base subject and normalized message-id saved with the message. Then all messages are evaluated and matched against their parents/ancestors. Messages are matched based on the References header, with a fall-back to an In-Reply-To header, and if neither is present/valid, based only on base subject. A References header typically points to multiple previous messages in a hierarchy. From oldest ancestor to most recent parent. An In-Reply-To header would have only a message-id of the parent message. A message is only linked to a parent/ancestor if their base subject is the same. This ensures unrelated replies, with a new subject, are placed in their own thread. The base subject is lower cased, has whitespace collapsed to a single space, and some components removed: leading "Re:", "Fwd:", "Fw:", or bracketed tag (that mailing lists often add, e.g. "[listname]"), trailing "(fwd)", or enclosing "[fwd: ...]". Messages are linked to all their ancestors. If an intermediate parent/ancestor message is deleted in the future, the message can still be linked to the earlier ancestors. If the direct parent already wasn't available while matching, this is stored as the message having a "missing link" to its stored ancestors.