Learning MySQL and MariaDB

Part III. Basics of Handling Data

The main point of a database is data. In Part II, you learned how to create and alter tables. As interesting as that may have been, the data that will go in tables is essential. If you felt a little confused when creating and altering tables in the previous chapters, it may be because it’s difficult to envision how tables and their columns will come into play with data, without having more experience adding data.

In this part, we will explore some of the fundamental ways in which data may be entered into a database and inserted into tables. This will be covered in Chapter 6, Inserting Data. It primarily involves the INSERT statement. The SQL statement for retrieving data from tables is the SELECT statement, which is covered extensively in Chapter 7, Selecting Data. You’ve seen both of these SQL statements in use several times in the previous chapters. However, in the next two chapters you will learn more about the various syntax and options for each of them, and you will be given plenty of practical examples of their use.

Data often needs to be changed and sometimes deleted, so in Chapter 8, Updating and Deleting Data we’ll take a look at how to update and delete data. This chapter will help you to learn how to use the UPDATE and the DELETE statements to do these common tasks. These are important for managing data in a database.

The final chapter of this part, Chapter 9, Joining and Subquerying Data, is an advanced one. It’s not too difficult to follow, ...