By Marc Delisle
This tutorial is aimed at programmers, analysts, and designers of dynamic Web sites who want to learn the basics of SQL.
What is SQL?
Structured Query Language is a non-procedural language used to define, manipulate and retrieve data. It was developed by IBM (System/R project) in 1974-1979. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) published in 1986 the first official standard of the language (later revised in 1989, 1992 and 1999), and since then, the industry has widely adopted SQL as the relational database language. Virtually every database system nowadays is interfaced through SQL.
The specific data architecture addressed by SQL is called the relational architecture. The various pieces of data (columns) are grouped into tables contained in databases, and we retrieve data using relations expressed between the tables.
In this article, we will use MySQL, a popular open-source implementation of SQL that is deployed by most Web host providers.
Toolkit for this guide
To be able to do the exercises in this guide, you will need an access to a MySQL server. Your interface to MySQL will be phpMyAdmin, a PHP application running on a PHP-enabled Web server. The book Mastering phpMyAdmin for effective MySQL Management is recommended for a comprehensive coverage of the phpMyAdmin tool.
This guide will show you the SQL syntax, sometimes by asking you to enter statements, and sometimes by letting you see how phpMyAdmin generates SQL statements based on your actions using the interface.
Structured Query Language is a non-procedural language used to define, manipulate and retrieve data. It was developed by IBM (System/R project) in 1974-1979. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) published in 1986 the first official standard of the language (later revised in 1989, 1992 and 1999), and since then, the industry has widely adopted SQL as the relational database language. Virtually every database system nowadays is interfaced through SQL.
The specific data architecture addressed by SQL is called the relational architecture. The various pieces of data (columns) are grouped into tables contained in databases, and we retrieve data using relations expressed between the tables.
In this article, we will use MySQL, a popular open-source implementation of SQL that is deployed by most Web host providers.
Toolkit for this guide
To be able to do the exercises in this guide, you will need an access to a MySQL server. Your interface to MySQL will be phpMyAdmin, a PHP application running on a PHP-enabled Web server. The book Mastering phpMyAdmin for effective MySQL Management is recommended for a comprehensive coverage of the phpMyAdmin tool.
This guide will show you the SQL syntax, sometimes by asking you to enter statements, and sometimes by letting you see how phpMyAdmin generates SQL statements based on your actions using the interface.
