# SQL Conformance

This section attempts to outline to what extent PostgreSQL conforms to the current SQL standard. The following information is not a full statement of conformance, but it presents the main topics in as much detail as is both reasonable and useful for users.

The formal name of the SQL standard is ISO/IEC 9075 Database Language SQL. A revised version of the standard is released from time to time; the most recent update appearing in 2023. The 2023 version is referred to as ISO/IEC 9075:2023, or simply as SQL:2023. The versions prior to that were SQL:2016, SQL:2011, SQL:2008, SQL:2006, SQL:2003, SQL:1999, and SQL-92. Each version replaces the previous one, so claims of conformance to earlier versions have no official merit. PostgreSQL development aims for conformance with the latest official version of the standard where such conformance does not contradict traditional features or common sense. Many of the features required by the SQL standard are supported, though sometimes with slightly differing syntax or function. Further moves towards conformance can be expected over time.

SQL-92 defined three feature sets for conformance: Entry, Intermediate, and Full. Most database management systems claiming SQL standard conformance were conforming at only the Entry level, since the entire set of features in the Intermediate and Full levels was either too voluminous or in conflict with legacy behaviors.

Starting with SQL:1999, the SQL standard defines a large set of individual features rather than the ineffectively broad three levels found in SQL-92. A large subset of these features represents the Core features, which every conforming SQL implementation must supply. The rest of the features are purely optional.

The standard is split into a number of parts, each also known by a shorthand name:

- ISO/IEC 9075-1 Framework (SQL/Framework)

- ISO/IEC 9075-2 Foundation (SQL/Foundation)

- ISO/IEC 9075-3 Call Level Interface (SQL/CLI)

- ISO/IEC 9075-4 Persistent Stored Modules (SQL/PSM)

- ISO/IEC 9075-9 Management of External Data (SQL/MED)

- ISO/IEC 9075-10 Object Language Bindings (SQL/OLB)

- ISO/IEC 9075-11 Information and Definition Schemas (SQL/Schemata)

- ISO/IEC 9075-13 Routines and Types using the Java Language (SQL/JRT)

- ISO/IEC 9075-14 XML-related specifications (SQL/XML)

- ISO/IEC 9075-15 Multi-dimensional arrays (SQL/MDA)

- ISO/IEC 9075-16 Property Graph Queries (SQL/PGQ)

Note that some part numbers are not (or no longer) used.

The PostgreSQL core covers parts 1, 2, 9, 11, and 14. Part 3 is covered by the ODBC driver, and part 13 is covered by the PL/Java plug-in, but exact conformance is currently not being verified for these components. There are currently no implementations of parts 4, 10, 15, and 16 for PostgreSQL.

PostgreSQL supports most of the major features of SQL:2023. Out of 177 mandatory features required for full Core conformance, PostgreSQL conforms to at least 170. In addition, there is a long list of supported optional features. It might be worth noting that at the time of writing, no current version of any database management system claims full conformance to Core SQL:2023.

In the following two sections, we provide a list of those features that PostgreSQL supports, followed by a list of the features defined in SQL:2023 which are not yet supported in PostgreSQL. Both of these lists are approximate: There might be minor details that are nonconforming for a feature that is listed as supported, and large parts of an unsupported feature might in fact be implemented. The main body of the documentation always contains the most accurate information about what does and does not work.

Feature codes containing a hyphen are subfeatures. Therefore, if a particular subfeature is not supported, the main feature is listed as unsupported even if some other subfeatures are supported.

## Supported Features

Identifier | Core? | Description | Comment
&features-supported;

## Unsupported Features

The following features defined in SQL:2023 are not implemented in this release of PostgreSQL. In a few cases, equivalent functionality is available.

Identifier | Core? | Description | Comment
&features-unsupported;

## XML Limits and Conformance to SQL/XML

Significant revisions to the XML-related specifications in ISO/IEC 9075-14 (SQL/XML) were introduced with SQL:2006. PostgreSQL's implementation of the XML data type and related functions largely follows the earlier 2003 edition, with some borrowing from later editions. In particular:

- Where the current standard provides a family of XML data types to hold document or content in untyped or XML Schema-typed variants, and a type `XML(SEQUENCE)` to hold arbitrary pieces of XML content, PostgreSQL provides the single `xml` type, which can hold document or content. There is no equivalent of the standard's sequence type.

- PostgreSQL provides two functions introduced in SQL:2006, but in variants that use the XPath 1.0 language, rather than XML Query as specified for them in the standard.

- PostgreSQL does not support the `RETURNING CONTENT` or `RETURNING SEQUENCE` clauses, functions which are defined to have these in the specification are implicitly returning content.

This section presents some of the resulting differences you may encounter.

### Queries Are Restricted to XPath 1.0

The PostgreSQL-specific functions `xpath()` and `xpath_exists()` query XML documents using the XPath language. PostgreSQL also provides XPath-only variants of the standard functions `XMLEXISTS` and `XMLTABLE`, which officially use the XQuery language. For all of these functions, PostgreSQL relies on the libxml2 library, which provides only XPath 1.0.

There is a strong connection between the XQuery language and XPath versions 2.0 and later: any expression that is syntactically valid and executes successfully in both produces the same result (with a minor exception for expressions containing numeric character references or predefined entity references, which XQuery replaces with the corresponding character while XPath leaves them alone). But there is no such connection between these languages and XPath 1.0; it was an earlier language and differs in many respects.

There are two categories of limitation to keep in mind: the restriction from XQuery to XPath for the functions specified in the SQL standard, and the restriction of XPath to version 1.0 for both the standard and the PostgreSQL-specific functions.

#### Restriction of XQuery to XPath

Features of XQuery beyond those of XPath include:

- XQuery expressions can construct and return new XML nodes, in addition to all possible XPath values. XPath can create and return values of the atomic types (numbers, strings, and so on) but can only return XML nodes that were already present in documents supplied as input to the expression.

- XQuery has control constructs for iteration, sorting, and grouping.

- XQuery allows declaration and use of local functions.

Recent XPath versions begin to offer capabilities overlapping with these (such as functional-style `for-each` and `sort`, anonymous functions, and `parse-xml` to create a node from a string), but such features were not available before XPath 3.0.

#### Restriction of XPath to 1.0

For developers familiar with XQuery and XPath 2.0 or later, XPath 1.0 presents a number of differences to contend with:

- The fundamental type of an XQuery/XPath expression, the `sequence`, which can contain XML nodes, atomic values, or both, does not exist in XPath 1.0. A 1.0 expression can only produce a node-set (containing zero or more XML nodes), or a single atomic value.

- Unlike an XQuery/XPath sequence, which can contain any desired items in any desired order, an XPath 1.0 node-set has no guaranteed order and, like any set, does not allow multiple appearances of the same item.

  The libxml2 library does seem to always return node-sets to PostgreSQL with their members in the same relative order they had in the input document. Its documentation does not commit to this behavior, and an XPath 1.0 expression cannot control it.

- While XQuery/XPath provides all of the types defined in XML Schema and many operators and functions over those types, XPath 1.0 has only node-sets and the three atomic types `boolean`, `double`, and `string`.

- XPath 1.0 has no conditional operator. An XQuery/XPath expression such as `if ( hat ) then hat/@size else "no hat"` has no XPath 1.0 equivalent.

- XPath 1.0 has no ordering comparison operator for strings. Both `"cat" < "dog"` and `"cat" > "dog"` are false, because each is a numeric comparison of two `NaN`s. In contrast, `=` and `!=` do compare the strings as strings.

- XPath 1.0 blurs the distinction between value comparisons and general comparisons as XQuery/XPath define them. Both `sale/@hatsize = 7` and `sale/@customer = "alice"` are existentially quantified comparisons, true if there is any `sale` with the given value for the attribute, but `sale/@taxable = false()` is a value comparison to the effective boolean value of a whole node-set. It is true only if no `sale` has a `taxable` attribute at all.

- In the XQuery/XPath data model, a document node can have either document form (i.e., exactly one top-level element, with only comments and processing instructions outside of it) or content form (with those constraints relaxed). Its equivalent in XPath 1.0, the root node, can only be in document form. This is part of the reason an `xml` value passed as the context item to any PostgreSQL XPath-based function must be in document form.

The differences highlighted here are not all of them. In XQuery and the 2.0 and later versions of XPath, there is an XPath 1.0 compatibility mode, and the W3C lists of function library changes and language changes applied in that mode offer a more complete (but still not exhaustive) account of the differences. The compatibility mode cannot make the later languages exactly equivalent to XPath 1.0.

#### Mappings between SQL and XML Data Types and Values

In SQL:2006 and later, both directions of conversion between standard SQL data types and the XML Schema types are specified precisely. However, the rules are expressed using the types and semantics of XQuery/XPath, and have no direct application to the different data model of XPath 1.0.

When PostgreSQL maps SQL data values to XML (as in `xmlelement`), or XML to SQL (as in the output columns of `xmltable`), except for a few cases treated specially, PostgreSQL simply assumes that the XML data type's XPath 1.0 string form will be valid as the text-input form of the SQL datatype, and conversely. This rule has the virtue of simplicity while producing, for many data types, results similar to the mappings specified in the standard.

Where interoperability with other systems is a concern, for some data types, it may be necessary to use data type formatting functions (such as those in functions-formatting) explicitly to produce the standard mappings.

### Incidental Limits of the Implementation

This section concerns limits that are not inherent in the libxml2 library, but apply to the current implementation in PostgreSQL.

#### Only `BY VALUE` Passing Mechanism Is Supported

The SQL standard defines two passing mechanisms that apply when passing an XML argument from SQL to an XML function or receiving a result: `BY REF`, in which a particular XML value retains its node identity, and `BY VALUE`, in which the content of the XML is passed but node identity is not preserved. A mechanism can be specified before a list of parameters, as the default mechanism for all of them, or after any parameter, to override the default.

To illustrate the difference, if `x` is an XML value, these two queries in an SQL:2006 environment would produce true and false, respectively:

    SELECT XMLQUERY('$a is $b' PASSING BY REF x AS a, x AS b NULL ON EMPTY);
    SELECT XMLQUERY('$a is $b' PASSING BY VALUE x AS a, x AS b NULL ON EMPTY);

PostgreSQL will accept `BY VALUE` or `BY REF` in an `XMLEXISTS` or `XMLTABLE` construct, but it ignores them. The `xml` data type holds a character-string serialized representation, so there is no node identity to preserve, and passing is always effectively `BY VALUE`.

#### Cannot Pass Named Parameters to Queries

The XPath-based functions support passing one parameter to serve as the XPath expression's context item, but do not support passing additional values to be available to the expression as named parameters.

#### No `XML(SEQUENCE)` Type

The PostgreSQL `xml` data type can only hold a value in `DOCUMENT` or `CONTENT` form. An XQuery/XPath expression context item must be a single XML node or atomic value, but XPath 1.0 further restricts it to be only an XML node, and has no node type allowing `CONTENT`. The upshot is that a well-formed `DOCUMENT` is the only form of XML value that PostgreSQL can supply as an XPath context item.