[This is preliminary documentation and subject to change.]
The Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) Query Language (WQL) is a subset of standard ANSI SQL with minor semantic changes to support WBEM. WQL includes operations for reading classes and instances and operations to support WBEM-specific schema relationships and event notification. WQL is a retrieval-only language and cannot be used to update, insert, or delete classes or instances.
WQL supports three statements:
The SELECT statement is the standard SQL statement for retrieving information with a few restrictions and a few extensions to support event notification . The ASSOCIATORS OF and REFERENCES OF statements are WBEM-specific variations of the SELECT statement that support the traversal of associations.
To view the Backus-Naur Form definition for WQL, see the SQL1 BNF Syntax Description appendix.