SEARCH NETTUTS

HOME TUTORIALS ARTICLES FREEBIES VIDEOS ABOUT SUBSCRIBE BY RSS | EMAIL | OTHER

HOME  \ TUTORIALS  \  OTHER  \  SQL FOR BEGINNERS PART 2 CATEGORIES

SQL for Beginners Part 2

LEARN MORE & SIGNUP | LOGIN HERE
Dec 22nd, 2009 in Other by Burak Guzel

It is important for every web developer to be familiar with database

interactions. In part two of the series , we will continue exploring the
SQL language and apply what we've learned on a MySQL database.
We will learn about Indexes, Data Types and more complex query
structures.

Author: Burak Guzel Subscribe

Burak Guzel is a full time PHP Web Developer living in Arizona, originally
Subscribe to an update feed:
from Istanbul, Turkey. He has a bachelors degree in Computer Science
and Engineering from The Ohio State University. He has over 8 years of
FULL RSS SHORT RSS
experience with PHP and MySQL. You can read more of his articles on
his website at PHPandStuff.com and follow him on Twitter here. TWITTER EMAIL

LINK FEED FREEBIES

VIDEOS

What You Need

Please refer to the "What You Need" section in the first article here: SQL For Beginners (part 1) .
Confused? Click Here!

If you would like to follow the examples in this article on your own development server, do the following:

1. Open MySQL Console and login.

2. If you haven't already, create a database named "my_first_db" with a CREATE query. Write for us!
3. Switch to the database with the USE statement.
We pay $150 for user submitted tutorials
and articles that we publish. Anyone can
send in a contribution

LEARN MORE

User Plus
Community Link Feed

6 Popular ‘Broken Link’ Checking Tools For Your

Website
Most web users and programmers must have
stumbled across the problem of broken links or a
deleted page, a forgotten sub-directory or a site
moved to a different domain

8 Terrific Ways To Enhance Your Communication Skill

We always come across some situations in which
we have to express our views and ideas to others.
Some people feel extreame difficulty in this.

250+ Free Photoshop Spray Brushes

We featured 250+ Free Photoshop Spray Brushes

Database Indexes that you can download for FREE. Feel free to check
them out and download some, if not all, brushes for
Indexes (or keys) are mainly used for improving the speed of data retrieval operations (eg. SELECT) on tables. your Photoshop.

They are such an important part of a good database design, it's hard to classify them as "optimization". In most Beautiful Snow Photographs
cases they are included in the initial design, but they can also be added later on with an ALTER TABLE query. Winter season is going on, so we thought why not to
 collect some beautiful snow photographs. So today
we have collected some beautiful snow photographs
Most common reasons for indexing database columns are:

Almost every table should have a PRIMARY KEY index, usually as an "id" column. 45+ Magnificent Wordpress Portfolio Themes
This article provides a list of more than 45
If a column is expected to contain unique values, it should have a UNIQUE index.
magnificent portfolio themes for Wordpress and will
If you are going to perform searches on a column often (in the WHERE clause), it should have a regular help you get started
INDEX.

If a column is used for a relationship with another table, it should be a FOREIGN KEY if possible, or have Top 10 Social Media Sources For Developing Quality
just a regular index otherwise. Active participation in credible social media sources
can really help you to develop good quality links and
generating immense amount of traffic to your blog or
PRIMARY KEY website.
Almost every table should have a PRIMARY KEY, in most cases as an INT with the AUTO_INCREMET option.
Cloud Hosting Vs Traditional Hosting
If you recall from the first article, we created a 'user_id' field in the users table and it was a PRIMARY KEY. This Choosing the right breed of web hosting could be
way, in a web application we can refer to all users by their id numbers. mind-boggling for a beginner. Web hosting services
allow individuals or organizations to own a piece of

The values stored in a PRIMARY KEY column must be unique. Also, there can not be more than one PRIMARY space on the World Wide Web

KEY on each table.

45+ Free Retro Wallpapers For Your Desktop
Let's see a sample query, creating a table for USA states list: Here is 45+ Free Retro Wallpapers for your Desktop
just for you. Browse through this collection and do

CREATE TABLE states ( not hesitate to download whichever you like.

id INT AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,

name VARCHAR(20) Logo Design : Collection Of Latest Logos For Inspi
); In our previous post this month we have collected
It can also be written like this: logo design tutorials for our readers to learn
designing logos. So today we have collected some
CREATE TABLE states ( nice looking logos, guys check this beautiful logos to
id INT AUTO_INCREMENT, get inspire for your next logo design project.
name VARCHAR(20),
PRIMARY KEY (id)
5 Terrific Web-Browsers To Safeguard Kid’s Internet
);
Activities
UNIQUE These browsers will help the parents who have a
tough time with their kids getting into undesired sites,
Since we are expecting the state name to be a unique value, we should change the previous query example a
by chance.
bit:

CREATE TABLE states (

SUBMIT MORE SUBSCRIBE
id INT AUTO_INCREMENT,
name VARCHAR(20),
PRIMARY KEY (id),
UNIQUE (name)
);
By default, the index will be named after the column name. If you want to, you can assign a different name to
it:

CREATE TABLE states (

id INT AUTO_INCREMENT,
name VARCHAR(20),
PRIMARY KEY (id),
UNIQUE state_name (name)
);
Now the index is named 'state_name' instead of 'name'.

INDEX
Let's say we want to add a column to represent the year that each state joined.

CREATE TABLE states (

id INT AUTO_INCREMENT,
name VARCHAR(20),
join_year INT,
PRIMARY KEY (id),
UNIQUE (name),
INDEX (join_year)
);
I just added the join_year column and indexed it. This type of index does not have the uniqueness restriction.

You can also name it KEY instead of INDEX.

CREATE TABLE states (

id INT AUTO_INCREMENT,
name VARCHAR(20),
join_year INT,
 PRIMARY KEY (id),
UNIQUE (name),
KEY (join_year)
);

More About Performance

Adding an index reduces the performance of INSERT and UPDATE queries. Because every time new data is
added to the table, the index data is also updated automatically, which requires additional work. The
performance gains on the SELECT queries usually outweigh this by far. But still, do not just add indexes on
every single table column without thinking about the queries you will be running.

Sample Table
Before we go further with more queries, I would like to create a sample table with some data.

This will be a list of US states, with their join dates (the date the state ratified the United States Constitution or
was admitted to the Union) and their current populations. You can copy paste the following to your MySQL
console:

CREATE TABLE states (

id INT AUTO_INCREMENT,
name VARCHAR(20),
join_year INT,
population INT,
PRIMARY KEY (id),
UNIQUE (name),
KEY (join_year)
);

INSERT INTO states VALUES

(1, 'Alabama', 1819, 4661900),
(2, 'Alaska', 1959, 686293),
(3, 'Arizona', 1912, 6500180),
(4, 'Arkansas', 1836, 2855390),
(5, 'California', 1850, 36756666),
(6, 'Colorado', 1876, 4939456),
(7, 'Connecticut', 1788, 3501252),
(8, 'Delaware', 1787, 873092),
(9, 'Florida', 1845, 18328340),
(10, 'Georgia', 1788, 9685744),
(11, 'Hawaii', 1959, 1288198),
(12, 'Idaho', 1890, 1523816),
(13, 'Illinois', 1818, 12901563),
(14, 'Indiana', 1816, 6376792),
(15, 'Iowa', 1846, 3002555),
(16, 'Kansas', 1861, 2802134),
(17, 'Kentucky', 1792, 4269245),
(18, 'Louisiana', 1812, 4410796),
(19, 'Maine', 1820, 1316456),
(20, 'Maryland', 1788, 5633597),
(21, 'Massachusetts', 1788, 6497967),
(22, 'Michigan', 1837, 10003422),
(23, 'Minnesota', 1858, 5220393),
(24, 'Mississippi', 1817, 2938618),
(25, 'Missouri', 1821, 5911605),
(26, 'Montana', 1889, 967440),
(27, 'Nebraska', 1867, 1783432),
(28, 'Nevada', 1864, 2600167),
(29, 'New Hampshire', 1788, 1315809),
(30, 'New Jersey', 1787, 8682661),
(31, 'New Mexico', 1912, 1984356),
(32, 'New York', 1788, 19490297),
(33, 'North Carolina', 1789, 9222414),
(34, 'North Dakota', 1889, 641481),
(35, 'Ohio', 1803, 11485910),
(36, 'Oklahoma', 1907, 3642361),
(37, 'Oregon', 1859, 3790060),
(38, 'Pennsylvania', 1787, 12448279),
(39, 'Rhode Island', 1790, 1050788),
(40, 'South Carolina', 1788, 4479800),
(41, 'South Dakota', 1889, 804194),
(42, 'Tennessee', 1796, 6214888),
(43, 'Texas', 1845, 24326974),
(44, 'Utah', 1896, 2736424),
(45, 'Vermont', 1791, 621270),
(46, 'Virginia', 1788, 7769089),
(47, 'Washington', 1889, 6549224),
(48, 'West Virginia', 1863, 1814468),
(49, 'Wisconsin', 1848, 5627967),
(50, 'Wyoming', 1890, 532668);

GROUP BY: Grouping Data

The GROUP BY clause groups the resulting data rows into groups. Here is an example:

So what just happened? We have 50 rows in the table, but 34 results were returned by this query. This is
because the results were grouped by the 'join_year' column. In other words, we only see one row for each
distinct value of join_year. Since some states have the same join_year, we got less than 50 results.

For example, there was only one row for the year 1787, but there are 3 states in that group:

So there are three states here, but only Delaware's name showed up after the GROUP BY query earlier.
Actually, it could have been any of the three states and we can not rely on this piece of data. Then what is the
point of using the GROUP BY clause?

It would be mostly useless without using an aggregate function such as COUNT(). Let's see what some of these
functions do and how they can get us some useful data.

COUNT(*): Counting rows

This is perhaps the most commonly used function along with GROUP BY queries. It returns the number of rows
in each group.

For example we can use it to see the number of states for each join_year:

Grouping Everything
If you use a GROUP BY aggregate function, and do not specify a GROUP BY clause, the entire results will be put
in a single group.

Number of all rows in the table:

Number of rows satisfying a WHERE clause:

MIN(), MAX() and AVG()
These functions return the minimum, maximum and average values:

GROUP_CONCAT()
This function concatenates all values inside the group into a single string, with a given separator.

In the first GROUP BY query example, we could only see one state name per year. You can use this function to
see all names in each group:

If the resized image is hard to read, this is the query:

SELECT GROUP_CONCAT(name SEPARATOR ', '), join_year

FROM states GROUP BY join_year;

SUM()
You can use this to add up the numerical values.

IF() & CASE: Control Flow

Similar to other programming languages, SQL has some support for control flow.

IF()
This is a function that takes three arguments. First argument is the condition, second argument is used if the
condition is true and the third argument is used if the condition is false.
Here is a more practical example where we use it with the SUM() function:

SELECT

SUM(
IF(population > 5000000, 1, 0)
) AS big_states,

SUM(
IF(population <= 5000000, 1, 0)
) AS small_states

FROM states;
The first SUM() call counts the number of big states (population over 5 million) and the second one counts the
number of small states. The IF() call inside these SUM() calls return either 1 or 0 based on the condition.

Here is the result:

CASE
This works similar to the switch-case statements you might be familiar with from programming.

Let's say we want to categorize each state into one of three possible categories.

SELECT
COUNT(*),
CASE
WHEN population > 5000000 THEN 'big'
WHEN population > 1000000 THEN 'medium'
ELSE 'small' END
AS state_size
FROM states GROUP BY state_size;
As you can see, we can actually GROUP BY the value returned from the CASE statement. Here is what
happens:
HAVING: Conditions on Hidden Fields
HAVING clause allows us to apply conditions to 'hidden' fields, such as the returned results of aggregate
functions. So it is usually used along with GROUP BY.

For example, let's look at the query we used for counting number of states by join year:

SELECT COUNT(*), join_year FROM states GROUP BY join_year;

The result was 34 rows.

However, let's say we are only interested in rows that have a count higher than 1. We can not use the WHERE
clause for this:
This is where HAVING becomes useful:

Keep in mind that this feature may not be available in all database systems.

Subqueries
It is possible get the results of one query and use it for another query.

In this example, we will get the state with the highest population:

SELECT * FROM states WHERE population = (

SELECT MAX(population) FROM states
);
The inner query will return the highest population of all states. And the outer query will search the table again
using that value.

You might be thinking this was a bad example, and I somewhat agree. The same query could be more
efficiently written as this:

SELECT * FROM states ORDER BY population DESC LIMIT 1;

The results in this case are the same, however there is an important difference between these two kinds of
queries. Maybe another example will demonstrate that better.

In this example, we will get the last states that joined the Union:

SELECT * FROM states WHERE join_year = (

SELECT MAX(join_year) FROM states
);

There are two rows in the results this time. If we had used the ORDER BY ... LIMIT 1 type of query here, we
would not have received the same result.

IN()
Sometimes you may want to use multiple results returned by the inner query.

Following query finds the years, when multiple states joined the Union, and returns the list of those states:

SELECT * FROM states WHERE join_year IN (

SELECT join_year FROM states
GROUP BY join_year
HAVING COUNT(*) > 1
) ORDER BY join_year;
More on Subqueries
Subqueries can become quite complex, therefore I will not get much further into them in this article. If you
would like to read more about them, check out the MySQL manual.

Also it is worth noting that subqueries can sometimes have bad performance, so they should be used with
caution.

UNION: Combining Data

With a UNION query, we can combine the results of multiple SELECT queries.

This example combines states that start with the letter 'N' and states with large populations:

(SELECT * FROM states WHERE name LIKE 'n%')

UNION
(SELECT * FROM states WHERE population > 10000000);

Note that New York is both large and its name starts with the letter 'N'. But it shows up only once because
duplicate rows are removed from the results automatically.

Another nice thing about UNION is that you can combine queries on different tables.

Let's assume we have tables for employees, managers and customers. And each table has an e -mail field. If
we want to fetch all e-mails with a single query, we can run this:
(SELECT email FROM employees)
UNION
(SELECT email FROM managers)
UNION
(SELECT email FROM customers WHERE subscribed = 1);
It would fetch all emails of all employees and managers, but only the emails of customers that have subscribed
to receive emails.

INSERT Continued
We have already talked about the INSERT query in the last article. Now that we explored database indexes
today, we can talk about more advanced features of the INSERT query.

INSERT ... ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE

This is almost like a conditional statement. The query first tries to perform a given INSERT, and if it fails due to
a duplicate value for a PRIMARY KEY or UNIQUE KEY, it performs an UPDATE instead.

Let's create a test table first.

It's a table to hold products. The 'stock' column is the number of products we have in stock.

Now attempt to insert a duplicate value and see what happens.

We got an error as expected.

Let's say we received a new breadmaker and want to update the database, and we do not know if there is
already a record for it. We could check for existing records and then do another query based on that. Or we
could just do it all in one simple query:

REPLACE INTO
This works exactly like INSERT with one important exception. If a duplicate row is found, it deletes it first and
then performs the INSERT, so we get no error messages.
Note that since this is actually an entirely new row, the id was incremented.

INSERT IGNORE
This is a way to suppress the duplicate errors, usually to prevent the application from breaking. Sometimes you
may want to attempt to insert a new row and just let it fail without any complaints in case there is a duplicate
found.

No errors returned and no rows were updated.

Data Types
Each table column needs to have a data type. So far we have used INT, VARCHAR and DATE types but we did
not talk about them in detail. Also there are several other data types that we should explore.

First, let's start with the numeric data types. I like to put them into two separate groups: Integers vs. Non -
Integers.

Integer Data Types

An integer column can hold only natural numbers (no decimals). By default they can be negative or positive
numbers. But if the UNSIGNED option is set, it can only hold positive numbers.

MySQL supports 5 types of integers, with various sizes and ranges:

Non-Integer Numeric Data Types

These data types can hold decimal numbers: FLOAT, DOUBLE and DECIMAL.

FLOAT is 4 bytes, DOUBLE is 8 bytes and they work similarly. However DOUBLE has better precision.

DECIMAL(M,N) has a varying size based on the precision level, which can be customized. M is the maximum
number of digits, and N is the number of digits to the right of the decimal point.

For example, DECIMAL(13,4) has a maximum of 9 integer digits and 4 fractional digits.

String Data Types

As the name suggests, we can store strings in these data type columns.

CHAR(N) can hold up to N characters, and has a fixed size. For example CHAR(50) will always take 50
characters of space, per row, regardless of the size of the string in it. The absolute maximum is 255 characters

VARCHAR(N) works the same, but the storage size is not fixed. N is only used for the maximum size. If a string
shorter than N characters is stored, it will take that much less space on the hard drive. The absolute maximum
size is 65535 characters.

Variations of the TEXT data type is more suitable for long strings. TEXT has a limit of 65535 characters,
MEDIUMTEXT 16.7 million characters and LONGTEXT 4.3 billion characters. MySQL usually stores them on
separate locations on the server so that the main storage for the table remains relatively small and quick.

Date Types
DATE stores dates and displays them in this format 'YYYY-MM-DD' but does not contain the time info. It has a
range of 1001-01-01 to 9999-12-31.

DATETIME contains both the date and the time, and is displayed in this format 'YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS'. It has
a range of '1000 -01-01 00:00:00' to '9999-12-31 23:59:59'. It takes 8 bytes of space.

TIMESTAMP works like DATETIME with a few exceptions. It takes only 4 bytes of space and the range is '1970 -
01-01 00:00:01' UTC to '2038-01-19 03:14:07' UTC. So, for example it may not be good for storing birth dates.

TIME only stores the time, and YEAR only stores the year.

Other
There are some other data types supported by MySQL. You can see a list of them here. You should also check
out the storage sizes of each data type here.

Conclusion
Thank you for reading the article. SQL is an important language and a tool in the web developers arsenal.

Please leave your comments and questions, and have a great day!

Follow us on Twitter , or subscribe to the Nettuts+ RSS Feed for the best web development tutorials on the
web. Ready

Ready to take your skills to the next level, and start profiting from your scripts and components?
Check out our sister marketplace, CodeCanyon .

Related Posts
10 Essential SQL Tips for Developers
Check out some more great tutorials and
Other
articles that you might like
SQL for Beginners
Other

Top 20+ MySQL Best Practices

Other
Enjoy this Post?
Your vote will help us grow this site and
127
provide even more awesomeness tweets

retweet

Plus Members
Source Files, Bonus Tutorials and
More for $9 a month for all TUTS+
sites in one subscription.

JOIN NOW SIGN IN

( ADD YOURS )
User Comments

Excellent!

alvaro obyrne
December 22nd

Pertamax!
Great!!

Rachmat Kukuh
R.
December 22nd

Wekeke, gagal pertamax gan

Btw thanks for sharing

Gagal maning, gagal maning.

Padahal udah mantengin twetterx.. -__-

Wow! Great article! There are a few things here that I was not aware you
could do…which is kinda sad. Haha.. Thanks for the tut!

Michael
December 22nd

thanks for it, i was waiting for this one

 thanks for it, i was waiting for this one

vlasnn
December 22nd

thanks for this tutorial, i was looking for it since the first one, I hope is
going to be more

vlasnn
December 22nd

Big thanks for another great tuts!

Myfacefriends
December 22nd

Cool article. Can ’t wait for part 3!

David Singer
December 22nd

Excellent Tutorial Covers advanced stuff in an easy way – Only

suggestion is that it can be more advanced.

Commenter
December 22nd

What I meant to say is that it can be more indepth.

Nice tuts , some are new to me. Like the if and Union
Hoping to see part 3.

arnold
December 22nd

Compaq and informative.

Monie
December 22nd

awesome!
Great article! i need some SQL Tuts.. lol

Bguz Ryanto
December 22nd

Great job! Thank you!

 Great job! Thank you!

Mooa
December 22nd

Very Useful

Imran Khan
December 22nd

Very nice tutorial! I’m looking fwd to the next parts.

One word in regard to the subqueries explanation …

Brent Alexander
December 22nd 1. SELECT * FROM states WHERE join_year = (
2. SELECT MAX(join_year) FROM states
3. );

You can use the ORDER BY, DESC LIMIT function and just change the
LIMIT to 2 instead of 1 w/o using a sub-query. Not the greatest example
but amazing tutorial. I ’m learning a lot already!

Yes, but what if you don ’t know in advance how many states are with
the same year? That ’s the point of this example. There could be three
or four states…

wow.. this is total a great tutorial! Keep it up!

Shiro
December 22nd

Thanks for this great tutorial, its a big help

Mars
December 22nd

This is what i’m looking for!

Thx

Victor
December 23rd

Great Article! Congrats and thank you.

Pantelis
December 23rd

Very nice tut Waiting for the next one

 Very nice tut Waiting for the next one

Kraftking
December 23rd

Thank you for this Burak, it ’s really nice to read tutorial about SQL.
I have a quick question for you. For example in your code you have IF
(population > 5000000, 1, 0) that will return 1 if the statement is true.
What if i had 3 columns like name, last_name, age and to write statement
Zoran
that selects the name if age is bigger than lets say 40 otherwise to select
December 23rd
the last_name? Any way to force sql to select columns that you want?

IF(age > 40, last_name, name)

Thanks, it actually works …  . You should cover MySQL triggers

in your next series, engines like InnoDB and MyISAM and
differences between them according to the versions of MySQL,
also, views, stored procedures and another thing i am using a lot
is Indexing and fulltext searching in boolean mode which is
better search pattern than using LIKE statement. This is just an
idea, but actually using triggers with control flow functions in one
of my projects helped me learn a lot about MySQL.
Thank you again for your answer.

Very Useful Article.

welcome for 3rd Part.

Hitesh
December 23rd Thanks.

I love SQL with Store Procedure

Soner G önül
December 23rd

Thanks a lot! This is great article. I’m impressed. =)

Rich
December 23rd

Yes you are a big inspiration …

perhaps a little tip to place your sql code in sql tags with the light option.
MarcelMarnix It works for me …
December 23rd
 [sql, light='true']SELECT * FROM states WHERE join_year IN (
SELECT join_year FROM states
GROUP BY join_year
HAVING COUNT(*) > 1
) ORDER BY join_year;[/sql]

tebrikler , devam

eren yagdiran
December 23rd

Thanks for this tutorial. I wasn ’t able to paste text from this article into
the mysqlconsole … Any tips?

Marcel
December 24th

Solved: the [view plain copy to clipboard print ?] options are missing in
the first code examples. I cleaned the first code examples in a text editor.

Marcel
December 24th

Propper job, thanks for the post shed some light on a few issues still
getting my head round SQL.

original art
December 24th

Loving this series of articles on SQL. Up to now I had always been using
frameworks which had an ORM built in like Rails ActiveRecord. The
problem with these is that they abstract away from whats happening on a
low level – the SQL. In my opinion basic knowledge of SQL is vital to any
Damian Nicholson
web developer, regardless of the framework your using.
December 26th

Thanks for this great tutorial! Bookmarked for future reference =)

Cielo
December 27th

so easy to follow, thanks!

Josh
December 30th

Cool, a quick refreshment

Adnan
January 4th
 ( GET A GRAVATAR )
Add Your Comment

Your Name
January 4th

ADD COMMENT

( REPLY )

PART OF THE TUTS+ NETWORK

Copyright & Usage Write a Tutorial Suggestions? Related Sites

( REPLY )

The effects and techniques Writing a tutorial or article for the site This is YOUR site, so if you have Envato
demonstrated in tutorials on the is not only a great way to get suggestions or feedback on how we
Psdtuts+
Tuts+ network can be used in exposure and give back to the can improve it for you, please let us
whatever manner you wish without community, but we'll also give you know! We do our best to keep up! Nettuts+
attribution. $150 cash to boot!
Audiotuts+
Make a Suggestion
Hidayat Sagita
The text, images and tutorials ( REPLY )
Read More Details December 23rd Vectortuts+
themselves are copyright their
Aetuts+
respective owners.
Activetuts+
You cannot copy whole tutorials,
Cgtuts+
either in English or translated to
another language. Phototuts+
Rachmat Kukuh R.
Photoshop Wiki
December 24th

Tuts+ Dashboard

( REPLY )

( REPLY )
( REPLY )

( REPLY )

( REPLY )

( REPLY )

Commenter
( REPLY ) December 22nd

( REPLY )

( REPLY )

( REPLY )

( REPLY )
( REPLY )

( REPLY )

Marcin
( REPLY ) December 23rd

( REPLY )

( REPLY )

( REPLY )

( REPLY )

( REPLY )

( REPLY )
 Burak
( REPLY ) December 23rd

Zoran
December 24th