Information Modeling and Relational Databases, 2nd Edition

12.13. SQL: Updating Table Populations

Generically, an “update” of the population of the database tables may involve any of three relational operations: insert a row into a table, delete a row from a table, or modify one or more values on a row. In SQL, the modify operation is called “update” so the term is sometime used in this restricted sense.

Let’s first consider how to insert rows into a table. For this, SQL provides an insert statement in two basic forms. The first adds a single row of data to a table. Its SQL-89 syntax is:

insert into tablename [ (col-list) ]
   values[constant-list)

If no columns are listed, values for all columns must be given. Character strings must be delimited by single quotes. A null value may be entered as null. ...