Glossary
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# Glossary

### Note

This glossary is still very thinly populated, and not all references in the main text have been properly linked and coordinated with this glossary. This will hopefully change in future revisions.

Attribute

  A property of objects stored in a database table. Attributes are represented as columns (or fields) in a table.

Active database

  See Database Object.

Connection

  See Database Object.

Column

  See Attribute.

Data Definition Language (DDL)

  The subset of SQL used for defining and examining the structure of a database.

Data Manipulation Language (DML)

  The subset of SQL used for inserting, deleting, updating and fetching data in a database.

database

  See Database Object.

Database Object

  An object of type database.

Field

  See Attribute.

Field Types Specifier

  A value that specifies the type of each field in a query.

Foreign Function Interface (FFI)

  An interface from Common Lisp to a external library which contains compiled functions written in other programming languages, typically C.

Query

  An SQL statement which returns a set of results.

RDBMS

  A Relational DataBase Management System (RDBMS) is a software package for managing a database in which the data is defined, organised and accessed as rows and columns of a table.

Record

  A sequence of attribute values stored in a database table.

Row

  See Record.

Structured Query Language (SQL)

  An ANSI standard language for storing and retrieving data in a relational database.

SQL Expression

  Either a string containing a valid SQL statement, or an object of type sql-expression.

Table

  A collection of data which is defined, stored and accessed as tuples of attribute values (i.e., rows and columns).

Transaction

  An atomic unit of one or more SQL statements of which all or none are successfully executed.

Tuple

  See Record.

View

  A table display whose structure and content are derived from an existing table via a query.

View Class

  The class `standard-db-object` or one of its subclasses.

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