The support for SQL in Advantage 7 is excellent, and in this release it gets even better. For starters, Advantage 8.1 now supports both FULL and RIGHT OUTER joins. Additional improvements include permitting the use of subqueries anywhere an expression is permitted, permitting aliased column names in HAVING clauses, the use of TOP X in subqueries, and the introduction of an escape character in LIKE conditions.

Advantage SQL scripts can now also return a cursor. Specifically, if SELECT is the last statement in a SQL script, that script will return the records fetched by that SELECT statement.