Summary
An important factor in the early acceptance of the relational model; more natural than earlier, procedural query languages.
Relationally complete; in fact, significantly more expressive power than relational algebra.
Even queries that can be expressed in RA can often be expressed more naturally in SQL.
Many alternative ways to write a query; optimizer should look for most efficient evaluation plan.
- In practice, users need to be aware of how queries are optimized and evaluated for best results.