Introduction
This article explores a very common construct in standard SQL and Transact-SQL – the SQL Server Update Statement. The standard SQL language as defined in the original standard is composed of just a few declarative commands. SQL is described as a declarative language because you tell the database engine what to do but not how to do it. Incidentally, SQL commands are English-like making it easy to guess what each command does.
In this article, we shall focus on just one of these commands – UPDATE. UPDATE statements are used to change the value in the table by specifying