Discovering SQL: A Hands-On Guide for Beginners

LET THERE BE DATABASE!

There is a bit of groundwork to be performed before we could submit our SQL statements to RDBMSs. If you have followed the instructions in Appendix B, complemented by the presentation slides on the accompanying book sites (both at www.wrox.com and at www.agilitator.com), you should have an up-and-running one (or all) of the RDBMSs used in this book; alternatively, you should have Microsoft Access or OpenOffice BASE installed. Please refer to Appendix B for step by step installation procedures for the RDBMS, and to Appendix A for instructions on how to install the Library sample database.

The following, with minor modifications, will work in server RDBMSs: Oracle, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL. In Microsoft Access and OpenOffice BASE/HSQLDB, you'd need to create a project.

The concept of a database, a logically confined data storage (exemplified by the now rarely used term data bank), managed by a program is rather intuitive. When using a desktop database such as Microsoft Access, your database is a file that Access creates for every new project you start; the server-based RDBMSs use a similar concept, though the details of implementation are much more complex. Fortunately, the declarative nature of SQL hides this complexity. It tells what needs to be done, not how to do it.

In the beginning, there was a database. The database we will ...