SQL 5th Edition

Who Should Read This Book?

If you need to store or retrieve data from a DBMS, you can do a much better job with a working knowledge of SQL. You don’t need to be a programmer to use SQL, and you don’t need to know programming languages, such as COBOL, C, or BASIC. SQL’s syntax is like English.

If you are a programmer, you can incorporate SQL into your programs. SQL adds powerful data manipulation and retrieval capability to conventional lan-guages. This book tells you what you need to know to use SQL’s rich assort-ment of tools and features inside your programs.

How This Book Is Organized

This book contains eight major parts. Each part contains several chapters. You may want to read this book from cover to cover once, although you don’t have to. After that, this book becomes a handy reference guide. You can turn to whatever section is appropriate to answer your questions.

Part I: Basic Concepts

Part I introduces the concept of a database and distinguishes relational data-bases from other types. It describes the most popular database architec-tures, as well as the major components of SQL.

Part II: Using SQL to Build Databases

You don’t need SQL to build a database. This part shows how to build a data-base by using Microsoft Access, and then you get to build the same database by using SQL. In addition to defining database tables, this part covers other important database features: domains, character sets, collations, transla-tions, keys, and indexes.

Throughout this part, I emphasize protecting your database from corruption, which is a bad thing that can happen in many ways. SQL gives you the tools to prevent corruption, but you must use them properly to prevent problems caused by bad database design, harmful interactions, operator error, and equipment failure.

Part III: Retrieving Data

After you have some data in your database, you want to do things with it: Add to the data, change it, or delete it. Ultimately, you want to retrieve useful information from the database. SQL tools enable you to do all this. These tools give you low-level, detailed control over your data.

Part IV: Controlling Operations

A big part of database management is protecting the data from harm, which can come in many shapes and forms. People may accidentally or intention-ally put bad data into database tables, for example. You can protect yourself by controlling who can access your database and what they can do. Another threat to data comes from unintended interaction of concurrent users’ opera-tions. SQL provides powerful tools to prevent this too. SQL provides much of the protection automatically, but you need to understand how the protection mechanisms work so you get all the protection you need.

Part V: SQL in the Real World

SQL is different from most other computer languages in that it operates on a whole set of data items at once, rather than dealing with them one at a time. This difference in operational modes makes combining SQL with other lan-guages a challenge, but you can face it by using the information in this book. You can exchange information with nondatabase applications by using XML. I also describe in depth how to use SQL to transfer data across the Internet or an intranet.

Part VI: Advanced Topics

In this part, you discover how to include set-oriented SQL statements in your programs and how to get SQL to deal with data one item at a time. This part also covers error handling. SQL provides you with a lot of informa-tion whenever something goes wrong in the execution of an SQL statement, and you find out how to retrieve and interpret that information.

Part VII: The Part of Tens

This section provides some important tips on what to do, and what not to do, in designing, building, and using a database.

Part VIII: Appendixes

Appendix A lists all of SQL:2003’s reserved words. These are words that have a very specific meaning in SQL and cannot be used for table names, column names, or anything other than their intended meaning. Appendix B gives you a basic glossary on some frequently used terms.
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