SQL Queries for Mere Mortals: A Hands-On Guide to Data Manipulation in SQL, Second Edition

The INSERT Statement

SQL has two main versions of the INSERT statement. In the first version, you include the VALUES keyword and list the values that you want your database system to add as a single new row in a specified target table. The second version lets you use a SELECT clause to fetch data from a table to insert into your target table. Let’s take a look at the VALUES version first.

Inserting Values

Although SQL is primarily designed to work with sets of data, much of the time you’ll use INSERT to add a single row of data to one of your tables. The simplest way to add one row to a table is to use the INSERT statement with the VALUES clause. Figure 16-1 shows the diagram for this statement.

Figure 16-1. The syntax diagram of the INSERT ...