- "The function SELECT selects data from DATABASE, which has a
-default value of *DEFAULT-DATABASE*, given the constraints
-specified by the rest of the ARGS. It returns a list of objects
-as specified by SELECTIONS. By default, the objects will each be
-represented as lists of attribute values. The argument SELECTIONS
-consists either of database identifiers, type-modified database
-identifiers or literal strings. A type-modifed database
-identifier is an expression such as [foo :string] which means
-that the values in column foo are returned as Lisp strings. The
-FLATP argument, which has a default value of nil, specifies if
-full bracketed results should be returned for each matched
-entry. If FLATP is nil, the results are returned as a list of
-lists. If FLATP is t, the results are returned as elements of a
-list, only if there is only one result per row. The arguments
-ALL, SET-OPERATION, DISTINCT, FROM, WHERE, GROUP-BY, HAVING and
-ORDER-by have the same function as the equivalent SQL expression.
-The SELECT function is common across both the functional and
-object-oriented SQL interfaces. If selections refers to View
-Classes then the select operation becomes object-oriented. This
-means that SELECT returns a list of View Class instances, and
-SLOT-VALUE becomes a valid SQL operator for use within the where
-clause. In the View Class case, a second equivalent select call
-will return the same View Class instance objects. If REFRESH is
-true, then existing instances are updated if necessary, and in
-this case you might need to extend the hook INSTANCE-REFRESHED.
-The default value of REFRESH is nil. SQL expressions used in the
-SELECT function are specified using the square bracket syntax,
-once this syntax has been enabled using
-ENABLE-SQL-READER-SYNTAX."))
+ "Executes the SQL command EXPRESSION, which may be an SQL
+expression or a string representing any SQL statement apart from
+a query, on the supplied DATABASE which defaults to
+*DEFAULT-DATABASE*."))
+
+
+(defgeneric query (query-expression &key database result-types flatp field-names)
+ (:documentation
+ "Executes the SQL query expression QUERY-EXPRESSION, which may
+be an SQL expression or a string, on the supplied DATABASE which
+defaults to *DEFAULT-DATABASE*. RESULT-TYPES is a list of symbols
+which specifies the lisp type for each field returned by
+QUERY-EXPRESSION. If RESULT-TYPES is nil all results are returned
+as strings whereas the default value of :auto means that the lisp
+types are automatically computed for each field. FIELD-NAMES is t
+by default which means that the second value returned is a list
+of strings representing the columns selected by
+QUERY-EXPRESSION. If FIELD-NAMES is nil, the list of column names
+is not returned as a second value. FLATP has a default value of
+nil which means that the results are returned as a list of
+lists. If FLATP is t and only one result is returned for each
+record selected by QUERY-EXPRESSION, the results are returned as
+elements of a list."))
+
+
+;; OODML