This help book in the Language Reference book covers the following information:

The Borland Database Engine (BDE) enables access to database tables through the industry-standard SQL language.  Different table formats, for example InterBase¨ and Oracle, use different dialects of SQL.  Local SQL (sometimes called "client-based SQL") is a subset of ANSI-92 SQL for accessing DB (Paradox) and DBF (dBASE) tables and fields (called "columns" in SQL).