Learn SQL in a Month of Lunches

16 Inserting data

For 15 chapters, we’ve examined ways to read data using the SELECT statement. But all that data we read using the SELECT statement had to get into the tables somehow, so in this chapter, we’ll learn how to insert data.

Throughout this book, we’ve seen that the syntax of SQL is often like the English language. When it comes to inserting rows of data, this similarity holds true because the new keyword we’ll be using is INSERT. Let’s look at some ways to use INSERT to add data to the tables in our database.

16.1 Inserting specific values

The first way to insert data is to use specific values. The main idea to keep in mind is that when we insert data, we’re inserting a new row into an existing table.

Chapter 2 talked about rows, ...