> There's literally no operation on data that can't in principle be expressed as an SQL query (albeit the construction might be painful and tedious).
There are some problems though:
- Single query can't write to multiple tables.
- Single query can't return multiple resultsets.
You can write a stored procedure, but this is no longer "an SQL query", strictly speaking. And once you start writing stored procedures, you are no longer using just SQL, but whatever Ada-inspired procedural extension to SQL was implemented by the database vendor. In other words, you are using "a traditional programming language to work with the data".
There are some problems though:
- Single query can't write to multiple tables.
- Single query can't return multiple resultsets.
You can write a stored procedure, but this is no longer "an SQL query", strictly speaking. And once you start writing stored procedures, you are no longer using just SQL, but whatever Ada-inspired procedural extension to SQL was implemented by the database vendor. In other words, you are using "a traditional programming language to work with the data".