Introduction To SQL Part2
Introduction To SQL Part2
The three most frequestely used commands are
A ) Create Table
B) Select
C) Where
a) Create Table command:
This command is used when we want to create a
new table in the sql database, and the syntax of the create table command is
as follows:
The SQL syntax for CREATE TABLE is
CREATE TABLE "table_name"
("column 1" "data_type_for_column_1",
"column 2" "data_type_for_column_2",
... )
So, if we are to create the customer table specified as above, we would type in
CREATE TABLE customer
(First_Name char(50),
Last_Name char(50),
Address char(50),
City char(50),
Country char(25),
Birth_Date date)
Sometimes, we want to provide a default value for each column. A default value
is used when you do not specify a column's value when inserting data into the
table. To specify a default value, add "Default [value]" after the data type
declaration. In the above example, if we want to default column "Address" to
"Unknown" and City to "Mumbai", we would type in
CREATE TABLE customer
(First_Name char(50),
Last_Name char(50),
Address char(50) default 'Unknown',
City char(50) default 'Mumbai',
Country char(25),
Birth_Date date)
2)Select command!!
The SQL SELECT statement is used to select data from a SQL database table.
This is usually the very first SQL command every SQL newbie learns and this is
because the SELECT SQL statement is one of the most used SQL commands.
Please have a look at the general SQL SELECT syntax:
SELECT Column1, Column2, Column3,
FROM Table1
The list of column names after the SQL SELECT command determines which
columns you want to be returned in your result set. If you want to select all
columns from a database table, you can use the following SQL statement:
SELECT *
FROM Table1
When the list of columns following the SELECT SQL command is replaced with
asterix (*) all table columns are returned. It’s always better to explicitly specify
the columns in the SELECT list, as this will improve your query performance
significantly.
The table name following the SQL FROM keyword (in our case Table1) tells the
SQL interpreter which table to use to retrieve the data.
3) Where Clause:
The SQL WHERE clause is used to select data conditionally, by adding it to
already existing SQL SELECT query. We are going to use the Customers table
from the previous chapter, to illustrate the use of the SQL WHERE command.
Table: Customers
If we want to select all customers from our database table, having last name
'Accenture' we need to use the following SQL syntax:
SELECT *
FROM Customers
WHERE LastName = 'Accenture'
The result of the SQL expression above will be the following:
In this simple SQL query we used the "=" (Equal) operator in our WHERE
criteria:
LastName = 'Accenture'
But we can use any of the following comparison operators in conjunction with
the SQL WHERE clause:
<> (Not Equal)
SELECT *
FROM Customers
WHERE LastName <> 'Accenture'
> (Greater than)
SELECT *
FROM Customers
WHERE DOB > '1/1/1970'
>= (Greater or Equal)
SELECT *
FROM Customers
WHERE DOB >= '1/1/1970'
< (Less than)
SELECT *
FROM Customers
WHERE DOB < '1/1/1970'
<= (Less or Equal)
SELECT *
FROM Customers
WHERE DOB =< '1/1/1970'
LIKE (similar to)
SELECT *
FROM Customers
WHERE Phone LIKE '626%'