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)

Introduction

In the previous chapter, we explored SQL subqueries, CASE statements, and views. These features offer great flexibility when we work with database resources. To use these features, and all the other SQL product query features we have seen so far, we type a SQL command into the development environment, run it, and look for the results somewhere within that environment. This approach certainly works well enough, and we relied on it as we learned about MySQL. However, it won't work for applications that rely on SQL database products as data resources. We need a product feature that can somehow automate the queries we want to run and reliably handle all the required management and overhead. Fortunately, modern SQL products, including MySQL, offer the following features to solve this problem:

  • Stored procedures
  • Functions
  • Triggers

These features involve actual programming, and in this chapter, we'll explore the basic programming concepts. We&apos...