This article is about the language standard. For MS SQL 2016, the Microsoft product, see SQL Server 2016.
SQL:2016 or ISO/IEC 9075:2016 (under the general title "Information technology – Database languages – SQL") is the eighth revision of the ISO (1987) and ANSI (1986) standard for the SQLdatabasequery language. It was formally adopted in December 2016.[1] The standard consists of 9 parts which are described in some detail in SQL. The next version is SQL:2023.
New features
SQL:2016 introduced 44 new optional features.[2] 22 of them belong to the JSON functionality, ten more are related to polymorphic table functions. The additions to the standard include:
JSON: Functions to create JSON documents, to access parts of JSON documents and to check whether a string contains valid JSON data
Row Pattern Recognition: Matching a sequence of rows against a regular expression pattern
Date and time formatting and parsing
LISTAGG: A function to transform values from a group of rows into a delimited string
Polymorphic table functions: table functions without predefined return type
