I have been using PC/Focus for many years to maintain a database used for statistical analysis. The data structure is quite complex with a number of 1-1 and 1-n relationships. In Focus, these are all maintained in a single structure instead of separate tables. Each year we get a new populated structure. Focus then allows us to concatenate several years together, which have the same structure, into a virtual database which can be queried as if it were a single database.

I am not familiar with the state of the art in SQL servers, and am wondering if the same ease of access could be achieved with SQL. My previous experience with SQL was that you would have to do a series of select/joins with unions for each year of data to be included. Is this still the case?