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The Borland Database Engine (BDE) enables access to database tables through the industry-standard SQL language. Different table formats, for example InterBase¨ and Oracle, use different dialects of SQL. Local SQL (sometimes called "client-based SQL") is a subset of ANSI-92 SQL for accessing DB (Paradox) and DBF (dBASE) tables and fields (called "columns" in SQL).

Although it is called "local" SQL, the DB and DBF tables may reside on a remote network file server.

For information on the SQL dialect for other table formats, consult your SQL server documentation.

SQL statements are divided into two categories:

Data definition language
These statements are used for creating, altering, and dropping tables, and for creating and dropping indexes.

Data manipulation language
These statements are used for selecting, inserting, updating, and deleting table data.

In the examples, an SQL statement may be displayed on multiple lines for readability. But SQL is not line-oriented. When an SQL statement is specified in a string, as it is in a Query object’s sql property, the entire SQL statement is specified in a single line. However, if you include a multi-line SQL statement in a program file, you must add semicolons to the end of each line (except the last) to act as line continuation characters; otherwise, the statement will not compile correctly.

SQL is not case-sensitive. The convention for SQL keywords is all uppercase, which is used in this series of Help topics. SQL statements in the rest of the dBL Language Reference may use either uppercase or lowercase.