The following IQ features are not found in many other SQL implementations.
Sybase IQ has date, time and timestamp types that includes a year, month and day, hour, minutes, seconds and fraction of a second. For insertions or updates to date fields, or comparisons with date fields, a free format date is supported.
In addition, the following operations are allowed on dates:
Also, many functions are provided for manipulating dates and times. See Chapter 5, “SQL Functions” for a description of these.
Sybase IQ allows automatic joins between tables. In addition to the NATURAL and OUTER join operators supported in other implementations, Sybase IQ allows KEY joins between tables based on foreign key relationships. This reduces the complexity of the WHERE clause when performing joins.
Unlike Adaptive Server Anywhere, Sybase IQ does not allow subqueries to appear wherever expressions are allowed. Sybase IQ only supports subqueries as allowed in the SQL-1989 grammar, plus in the SELECT list of the top level query block or in the SET clause of an UPDATE statement. It does not support Adaptive Server Anywhere's extensions.
Sybase IQ supports several functions not in the ANSI SQL definition. See Chapter 5, “SQL Functions” for a full list of available functions.
