Learning MySQL and MariaDB

Chapter 4. Creating Databases and Tables

In order to be able to add and manipulate data, you first have to create a database. There’s not much to this. You’re creating just a container in which you will add tables. Creating a table is more involved and offers many choices. There are several types of tables from which to choose, some with unique features. When creating tables, you must also decide on the structure of each table: the number of columns, the type of data each column may hold, how the tables will be indexed, and several other factors. However, while you’re still learning, you can accept the default setting for most of the options when creating tables.

There are a few basic things to decide when creating a structure for your data:

• The number of tables to include in your database, as well as the table names

• For each table, the number of columns it should contain, as well as the column names

• For each column, what kind of data is to be stored

For the last part, in the beginning, we’ll use just four types of columns: columns that contain only numbers; columns that contain alphanumeric characters, but not too many (i.e., a maximum of 255 characters); columns that contain plenty of text and maybe binary files; and columns for recording date and time information. This is a good starting point for creating a database and tables. As we get further along, we can expand that list of column data types to improve the performance of your databases.

This chapter contains examples of how to ...