SQL NOTES

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Each table in a relational database includes information that uniquely identifies a row
in that table (known as the primary key ), along with additional information needed to
describe the entity
completely.

Every database server provides a mechanism for generating unique sets of numbers to
use as primary key values, so you won't need to worry about keeping track of what
numbers have been assigned.

A primary key consisting of two or more columns is known as a compound key

In this example, choosing fname /lname as the primary key would be referred to as a
natural key, whereas the choice of cust_id would be referred to as a surrogate key .
The decision whether to employ natural or surrogate keys is a topic of widespread
debate, but in this particular case the choice is clear, since a person's last name may
change (such as when a person adopts a spouse's last name), and primary key
columns should never be allowed to change once a value has been assigned.

Foreign keys are used to connect one entity to another.

Entity -Something of interest to the database user community. Examples include

customers, parts, geographic locations, etc.

Column - An individual piece of data stored in a table.

Row -A set of columns that together completely describe an entity or some action on
an entity. Also called a record.

Table - A set of rows, held either in memory (nonpersistent) or on permanent storage

(persistent).

Result set - Another name for a nonpersistent table, generally the result of an SQL
query.

Primary key - One or more columns that can be used as a unique identifier for each
row in a table.

Foreign key - One or more columns that can be used together to identify a single row
in another table.

A procedural language defines both the desired results and the mechanism, or
process, by which the results are generated. Nonprocedural languages also define the
desired results, but the process by which the results are generated is left to an
external agent.

The manner in which a statement is executed is left to a component of your database

engine known as the optimizer.

Most SQL implementations treat any text between the /* and */ tags as comments.

The maximum length for char columns is currently 255 bytes, whereas varchar
columns can be up to 65,535 bytes.

the concept of normalization, which is the process of ensuring that there are no
duplicate (other than foreign keys) or compound columns in your database design.

MySQL allows a check constraint to be attached to a column definition, as in the

following: gender CHAR(1) CHECK (gender IN ('M','F')),

MySQL does provide another character data type called enum that merges the check
constraint into the data type definition.

If you want to make sure that the person table does, in fact, exist, you can use the
describe command (or desc for short) to look at the table definition: mysql> DESC
person;

The order by clause tells the server how to sort the data returned by the query.
Without the order by clause, there is no guarantee that the data in the table will be
retrieved in any particular order.

all database servers on the market today provide a safe, robust method for generating
numeric keys. In some servers, such as the Oracle Database, a separate schema
object is used (called a sequence); in the case of MySQL, however, you simply need to
turn on the auto-increment feature for your primary key column. Normally, you would
do this at table creation, but doing it now provides the opportunity to learn another
SQL schema statement, alter table, which is used to modify the definition of an
existing table: ALTER TABLE person MODIFY person_id SMALLINT UNSIGNED
AUTO_INCREMENT;

If you will be working with XML data, you will be happy to know that most database
servers provide a simple way to generate XML output from a query. With MySQL, for
example, you can use the --xml option when invoking the mysql tool, and all your
output will automatically be formatted using XML.

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