Learn SQL in a Month of Lunches

2 Your first SQL query

Chapter 1 ended with a word about being immediately effective, and so now we’re going to do just that. We’re going to start looking at some data as it might be stored in a relational database, and we’re going to examine the way that data is structured. Doing this will help you better understand some terms to describe the data, which we will use throughout the book. Don’t worry, though: you’ll see just a handful of terms, and they are all words you have seen and used in conversation. I’m just defining them in the context of data stored in relational databases.

Also, you’ll get started with your first query. In case you didn’t know, a query refers to executing some SQL to retrieve data. As you progress through this book, ...