Creating Tables

Database designers spend considerable time normalizing tables and defining relationships and constraints before they write a line of SQL code. If you’re going to create tables for production databases, I recommend that you study database design and normalization principles beyond those presented in Chapter 2.

Recall from “Tables, Columns, and Rows” in Chapter 2 that a database is organized around tables. To a user or an SQL programmer, a database appears to be a collection of one or more tables (and nothing but tables). To create a table, you specify the following:

  • Table name

  • Column names

  • Data types of the columns

  • Constraints

The table name and the column names must conform to the rules for SQL identifiers; see “SQL Syntax” in ...

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