It has always bothered me that in this age of virtually all computer reference material being available online, dynamically and free, the ANSI/ISO committees still follow the 20th century "Brick and Mortar" practices of charging exorbiant fees for their standards documents and then has made itself financially dependent on this revenue. The ANSI SQL:2008 standard is broken into the following part(with Wikipedia links):
The part 2: Foundation, the core of the standard costs about $450, even just to download the PDF. Getting all of them would probably cost about $1500. Now I ask you, how can they even pretend to aspire to be a unversal standard for SQL when the average professional would have to pay almost 2 weeks salary to have the right to read and reference it?...
Anyway, the SQL:2008 standard came out last summer, Sybase has a nice summary of the new features here. Every couple of months I debate with myself whether or not to pay the $450 to get the Foundation PDF, but I just cannot justify it. Finally it occured to me that I could acheive a kind of compromise by downloading the free PDFs of the draft of the standard from 2006, here. Although only a draft, it is pretty close to that standard that was adopted (or so I here). More importantly, it does incorporate everything that was already in the SQL:2003 standard.
Si I have it now and will be slowly reading through it, making the occasional post about interesting things as I go.