Class - 1 Introduction To SQL Querying
Class - 1 Introduction To SQL Querying
What is SQL?
Why SQL
Table basics
Table Constraints
Selecting data
Creating tables
Data Types
Predicate operations (Where Clause)
Order By
What is SQL?
SQL is Structured Query Language, which is a computer language for storing, manipulating
and retrieving data stored in relational database.
SQL is the standard language for Relation Database System. All relational database
management systems like MySQL, MS Access, Oracle, Sybase, Informix, postgres and SQL
Server use SQL as standard database language.
Why SQL?
Allows users to define the data in database and manipulate that data.
Allows embedding within other languages using SQL modules, libraries & pre-
compilers.
There are various components included in the process. These components are Query
Dispatcher, Optimization Engines, Classic Query Engine and SQL Query Engine, etc. Classic
query engine handles all non-SQL queries but SQL query engine won't handle logical files.
SQL Commands:
The standard SQL commands to interact with relational databases are CREATE, SELECT,
INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE and DROP. These commands can be classified into groups based
on their nature:
The data in RDBMS is stored in database objects called tables. The table is a collection of
related data entries and it consists of columns and rows.
Remember, a table is the most common and simplest form of data storage in a relational
database.
+----+----------+-----+-----------+----------+
| ID | NAME | AGE | ADDRESS | SALARY |
+----+----------+-----+-----------+----------+
| 1 | Ramesh | 32 | Ahmedabad | 2000.00 |
| 2 | Khilan | 25 | Delhi | 1500.00 |
| 3 | kaushik | 23 | Kota | 2000.00 |
+----+----------+-----+-----------+----------+
What is field?
Every table is broken up into smaller entities called fields. The fields in the CUSTOMERS
table consist of ID, NAME, AGE, ADDRESS and SALARY.
A field is a column in a table that is designed to maintain specific information about every
record in the table.
A record, also called a row of data, is each individual entry that exists in a table. For
example there are 7 records in the above CUSTOMERS table. Following is a single row of
data or record in the CUSTOMERS table:
+----+----------+-----+-----------+----------+
| 1 | Ramesh | 32 | Ahmedabad | 2000.00 |
+----+----------+-----+-----------+----------+
What is column?
A column is a vertical entity in a table that contains all information associated with a
specific field in a table.
For example, a column in the CUSTOMERS table is ADDRESS, which represents location
description and would consist of the following:
+-----------+| ADDRESS |+-----------+
| Ahmedabad |
| Delhi |
| Kota |
+----+------+
A NULL value in a table is a value in a field that appears to be blank, which means a field
with a NULL value is a field with no value.
It is very important to understand that a NULL value is different than a zero value or a field
that contains spaces. A field with a NULL value is one that has been left blank during
record creation.
SQL Constraints:
Constraints are the rules enforced on data columns on table. These are used to limit the
type of data that can go into a table. This ensures the accuracy and reliability of the data
in the database.
Constraints could be column level or table level. Column level constraints are applied only
to one column whereas table level constraints are applied to the whole table.
NOT NULL Constraint: Ensures that a column cannot have NULL value.
DEFAULT Constraint: Provides a default value for a column when none is specified.
CHECK Constraint: The CHECK constraint ensures that all values in a column satisfy
certain conditions.
INDEX: Use to create and retrieve data from the database very quickly.
Data Integrity:
The following categories of the data integrity exist with each RDBMS:
Entity Integrity: There are no duplicate rows in a table.
Domain Integrity: Enforces valid entries for a given column by restricting the
type, the format, or the range of values.
Referential integrity: Rows cannot be deleted, which are used by other records.
User-Defined Integrity: Enforces some specific business rules that do not fall into
entity, domain or referential integrity.
Selecting data:
The select statement is used to query the database and retrieve selected data that match
the criteria that you specify. Here is the format of a simple select statement:
select "column1"
[,"column2",etc]
from "tablename"
[where "condition"];
[] = optional
A SQL SELECT statement can be broken down into numerous elements, each beginning
with a keyword. Although it is not necessary, common convention is to write these
keywords in all capital letters. In this article, we will focus on the most fundamental and
common elements of a SELECT statement, namely
SELECT
FROM
WHERE
ORDER BY
The most basic SELECT statement has only 2 parts: (1) what columns you want to return
and (2) what table(s) those columns come from.
If we want to retrieve all of the information about all of the customers in the Employees
table, we could use the asterisk (*) as a shortcut for all of the columns, and our query
looks like
If we want only specific columns (as is usually the case), we can/should explicitly specify
them in a comma-separated list, as in which results in the specified fields of data for all of
the rows in the table:
The next thing we want to do is to start limiting, or filtering, the data we fetch from the
database. By adding a WHERE clause to the SELECT statement, we add one (or more)
conditions that must be met by the selected data. This will limit the number of rows that
answer the query and are fetched. In many cases, this is where most of the "action" of a
query takes place.
We can continue with our previous query, and limit it to only those employees living in
London:
SELECT EmployeeID, FirstName, LastName, HireDate, City FROM Employees WHERE City = 'London'
Resulting in
If you wanted to get the opposite, the employees who do not live in London, you would
write
SELECT EmployeeID, FirstName, LastName, HireDate, City FROM Employees WHERE City <> 'London'
It is not necessary to test for equality; you can also use the standard equality/inequality
operators that you would expect. For example, to get a list of employees who were hired
on or after a given date, you would write
SELECT EmployeeID, FirstName, LastName, HireDate, City FROM Employees WHERE HireDate >= '1-july-1993'
Of course, we can write more complex conditions. The obvious way to do this is by having
multiple conditions in the WHERE clause. If we want to know which employees were hired
between two given dates, we could write
resulting in
Note that SQL also has a special BETWEEN operators that checks to see if a value is
between two values (including equality on both ends). This allows us to rewrite the
previous query as
Let us finish this section on the WHERE clause by looking at two additional, slightly more
sophisticated, comparison operators.
What if we want to check if a column value is equal to more than one value? If it is only 2
values, then it is easy enough to test for each of those values, combining them with the
OR operator and writing something like
However, if there are three, four, or more values that we want to compare against, the
above approach quickly becomes messy. In such cases, we can use the IN operator to test
against a set of values. If we wanted to see if the City was either Seattle, Tacoma, or
Redmond, we would write
As with the BETWEEN operator, here too we can reverse the results obtained and query
for those rows where City is not in the specified list:
[] matches any single character within the specified range (e.g. [a-f]) or set
(e.g. [abcdef]).
[^] matches any single character not within the specified range (e.g. [^a-f]) or
set (e.g. [^abcdef]).
WHERE FirstName LIKE '_im' finds all three-letter first names that end with 'im'
(e.g. Jim, Tim).
WHERE LastName LIKE '%stein' finds all employees whose last name ends with
'stein'
WHERE LastName LIKE '%stein%' finds all employees whose last name includes
'stein' anywhere in the name.
WHERE FirstName LIKE '[JT]im' finds three-letter first names that end with 'im' and
begin with either 'J' or 'T' (that is, only Jim and Tim)
WHERE LastName LIKE 'm[^c]%' finds all last names beginning with 'm' where the
following (second) letter is not 'c'.
Here too, we can opt to use the NOT operator: to find all of the employees whose first
name does not start with 'M' or 'A', we would write
SELECT EmployeeID, FirstName, LastName, HireDate, City FROM Employees WHERE (FirstName NOT LIKE 'M%')
AND (FirstName NOT LIKE 'A%')
resulting in
The ORDER BY Clause
Until now, we have been discussing filtering the data: that is, defining the conditions that
determine which rows will be included in the final set of rows to be fetched and returned
from the database. Once we have determined which columns and rows will be included in
the results of our SELECT query, we may want to control the order in which the rows
appear—sorting the data.
To sort the data rows, we include the ORDER BY clause. The ORDER BY clause includes
one or more column names that specify the sort order. If we return to one of our
firstSELECT statements, we can sort its results by City with the following statement:
By default, the sort order for a column is ascending (from lowest value to highest value),
as shown below for the previous query:
Note that to make it interesting, we have specified the sort order for the City column to be
descending (from highest to lowest value). The sort order for the Country column is still
ascending. We could be more explicit about this by writing
but this is not necessary and is rarely done. The results returned by this query are
It is important to note that a column does not need to be included in the list of selected
(returned) columns in order to be used in the ORDER BY clause. If we don't need to
see/use the Country values, but are only interested in them as the primary sorting field we
could write the query as
DATATY 1 1 TYP
MIN MAX STORAGE 8 9 NOTES
PE 0 1 E
= 2 bytes, etc...
Decimal -10^38+1 10^38–1 Precision 1-9 = 5 Exact The Decimal and the
bytes, precision Numeric data type is
10-19 = 9 bytes, exactly the same. Precision
precision 20-28 = is the total number of
13 bytes, precision digits. Scale is the number
29-38 = 17 bytes of decimals. For both the
minimum is 1 and the
maximum is 38.
Numeric same as same as same as Decimal Exact
Decimal Decimal
Float -1.79E + 308 1.79E + 308 4 bytes when Approx Precision is specified from 1
precision is less to 53.
than 25 and 8
bytes when
precision is 25
through 53
Creating Tables:
The create table statement is used to create a new table. Here is the format of a
simple create table statement:
Note: You may have as many columns as you'd like, and the constraints are optional.
Example:
To create a new table, enter the keywords create table followed by the table name,
followed by an open parenthesis, followed by the first column name, followed by the data
type for that column, followed by any optional constraints, and followed by a closing
parenthesis. It is important to make sure you use an open parenthesis before the
beginning table and a closing parenthesis after the end of the last column definition. Make
sure you separate each column definition with a comma. All SQL statements should end
with a ";".
The table and column names must start with a letter and can be followed by letters,
numbers, or underscores - not to exceed a total of 30 characters in length. Do not use any
SQL reserved keywords as names for tables or column names (such as "select", "create",
"insert", etc.).
Data types specify what the type of data can be for that particular column. If a column
called "Last_Name", is to be used to hold names, then that particular column should have
a "varchar" (variable-length character) data type.
Exercise:
Table: EMP Table: DEPT
24.Display details of all the employees and output should have highest comm row
displayed at end
25.Display details of all the employees and output should have highest comm row
displayed on top
26.Display the names of employees in order of commission(comm) i.e. the name of the
employee earning lowest commission(comm) should appear first
27.Display the names of employees in order of commission(comm) i.e. the name of the
employee earning highest commission(comm) should appear last
28.Display the names of employees in descending order of commission(comm) i.e., the
name of the employee earning highest commission(comm) should appear first
29.Display the names of employees in descending order of commission(comm) i.e., the
name of the employee earning lowest commission(comm) should appear last
30.Display the details from EMP table in order of employee name
31.Display EMPNO, ENAME, DEPTNO and SAL. Sort the output based on DEPTNO and then
by SAL
32.Display employee details from EMP table. Sort the output based on DEPTNO (highest to
lowest) and then by SAL (highest to lowest)
33.Display the name of employees along with their annual salary (SAL*12). The name of
the employee earning highest annual salary should appear first
34.Display ENAME, SAL, HRA, PF, DA, total salary for each employee. The output should
be in the order of total salary (HRA 15% of SAL, DA 10% of SAL, PF 5% of SAL and Total
Salary will be (SAL + HRA + DA) – PF
35.Display EMPNO, ENAME, SAL, and DEPTNO from EMP table. Output should be in the
order of length of ename(high to low), if length of ename is same for more employees
then sort the output by salary(high to low) and if more employees has same salary
than sort the output by ename
36.Write a query to display ename from EMP table. MILLER to be displayed in first row and
rest in ascending order
Class 2: Querying Multiple Tables
Understanding Joins
Querying with Inner Joins
Querying with Outer Joins
Querying with Cross Joins and Self Joins
Understanding Joins:
SQL join is instruction to a database to combine data from more than one table. There are
different kinds of joins, which have different rules for the results they create.
INNER JOIN:
An inner join produces a result set that is limited to the rows where there is a match in
both tables for what we're looking for. If you don't know which kind of join you need, this
will usually be your best bet.
Example:
Example:
A right outer join, or right join, is the same as a left join, except the roles are reversed. All
of the rows from the right hand side table show up in the result, but the rows from the
table on the left are only there if they match the table on the right. Empty spaces are null,
just like with the the left join.
Example:
A full outer join, or just outer join, produces a result set with all of the rows of both tables,
regardless of whether there are any matches. Similarly to the left and right joins, we call
the empty spaces null.
Example
The cross join returns a table with a potentially very large number of rows. The row count
of the result is equal to the number of rows in the first table times the number of rows in
the second table. Each row is a combination of the rows of the first and second table.
Example:
SELF JOIN
You can join a single table to itself. In this case, you are using the same table twice.
Example: