Book Image

The SQL Workshop

By : Frank Solomon, Prashanth Jayaram, Awni Al Saqqa
Book Image

The SQL Workshop

By: Frank Solomon, Prashanth Jayaram, Awni Al Saqqa

Overview of this book

Many software applications are backed by powerful relational database systems, meaning that the skills to be able to maintain a SQL database and reliably retrieve data are in high demand. With its simple syntax and effective data manipulation capabilities, SQL enables you to manage relational databases with ease. The SQL Workshop will help you progress from basic to advanced-level SQL queries in order to create and manage databases successfully. This Workshop begins with an introduction to basic CRUD commands and gives you an overview of the different data types in SQL. You'll use commands for narrowing down the search results within a database and learn about data retrieval from single and multiple tables in a single query. As you advance, you'll use aggregate functions to perform calculations on a set of values, and implement process automation using stored procedures, functions, and triggers. Finally, you'll secure your database against potential threats and use access control to keep your data safe. Throughout this Workshop, you'll use your skills on a realistic database for an online shop, preparing you for solving data problems in the real world. By the end of this book, you'll have built the knowledge, skills and confidence to creatively solve real-world data problems with SQL.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

String Functions

In the previous chapters, we saw that text or string data is an important part of real-world database resources. SQL database products offer dedicated functions to handle and manipulate string data. As we'll see, this makes them useful in a SELECT clause. In addition, although the LIKE operator is not a string function, it searches for string patterns in other strings. This makes it incredibly useful in a WHERE clause. We'll see this as well. Since we can use string functions in SELECT statements and WHERE clauses, we can also use them in stored procedures, user-defined functions, and triggers. One example of a string function is the UPPER function. This function converts a string value into all uppercase characters. Consider the following query:

USE packt_online_shop;
SELECT ProductID, ProductName, UPPER(ProductName) AS 'UPPER CASE PRODUCT NAME'
FROM   Products;

Running the preceding code in the SQL query window yields the following output...