Announcing the General Availability of the SQL:2023 Standard

We are pleased to announce the publication of the new SQL Standard version by the International Standards Organization (ISO), SQL:2023, and successor to the SQL:2016 Standard.

Keeping true to Oracle’s commitment to making the power of SQL accessible to everyone, Oracle once again was actively involved in driving new features into the Standard. Along the way, known bugs from the previous version were also fixed.

One of the highlights of SQL:2023 is the entirely new Part 16, SQL/PGQ, which defines ways for the SQL language to represent property graphs and to interact with them.

Another highlight is the addition of a new JSON data type. This data type is the basis for the new simplified SQL/JSON dot-notation syntax, which enables users to write less verbose SQL/JSON queries compared to using the JSON_QUERY and JSON_VALUE functions.

SQL:2023 also added a number of new scalar and aggregate functions, among others: GREATEST, LEAST, RPAD, LPAD, RTRIM, LTRIM, and ANY_VALUE.

Many of these features are already supported in Oracle Database 23c Free – Developer Release, which can be downloaded from https://www.oracle.com/database/free/download/

Oracle is proud to be part of the SQL Standards community. We extend our congratulations on the publication of the new SQL Standard to all other SQL Standards community members.

A special thank you to our SQL Standards team here at Oracle: Jan Michels, Fred Zemke, Jörn Bartels as the Associate Editor of the SQL Standard, and all other employees who helped shape SQL:2023.

The 11 parts of the SQL:2023 Standard are published and available for purchase in the ISO Store:

• ISO/IEC 9075-1:2023 Information technology — Database languages SQL — Part 1: Framework (SQL/Framework)
• ISO/IEC 9075-2:2023 Information technology — Database languages SQL — Part 2: Foundation (SQL/Foundation)
• ISO/IEC 9075-3:2023 Information technology — Database languages SQL — Part 3: Call-Level Interface (SQL/CLI)
• ISO/IEC 9075-4:2023 Information technology — Database languages SQL — Part 4: Persistent stored modules (SQL/PSM)
• ISO/IEC 9075-9:2023 Information technology — Database languages SQL — Part 9: Management of External Data (SQL/MED)
• ISO/IEC 9075-10:2023 Information technology — Database languages SQL — Part 10: Object language bindings (SQL/OLB)
• ISO/IEC 9075-11:2023 Information technology — Database languages SQL — Part 11: Information and definition schemas (SQL/Schemata)
• ISO/IEC 9075-13:2023 Information technology — Database languages SQL — Part 13: SQL Routines and types using the Java TM programming language (SQL/JRT)
• ISO/IEC 9075-14:2023 Information technology — Database languages SQL — Part 14: XML-Related Specifications (SQL/XML)
• ISO/IEC 9075-15:2023 Information technology — Database languages SQL — Part 15: Multidimensional arrays (SQL/MDA)
• ISO/IEC 9075-16:2023 Information technology — Database languages SQL — Part 16: Property Graph Queries (SQL/PGQ)