What is Data?

Data is nothing but facts and statistics stored or free flowing over a network, generally it's raw and unprocessed. For example: When you visit any
website, they might store you IP address, that is data, in return they might add a cookie in your browser, marking you that you visited the website, that is
data, your name, it's data, your age, it's data.
Data becomes information when it is processed, turning it into something meaningful. Like, based on the cookie data saved on user's browser, if a
website can analyse that generally men of age 20-25 visit us more, that is information, derived from the data collected.

What is a Database?
A Database is a collection of related data organised in a way that data can be easily accessed, managed and updated. Database can be software
based or hardware based, with one sole purpose, storing data.
During early computer days, data was collected and stored on tapes, which were mostly write-only, which means once data is stored on it, it can never
be read again. They were slow and bulky, and soon computer scientists realised that they needed a better solution to this problem.
Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle was amongst the first few, who realised the need for a software based Database Management System.

What is DBMS?
A DBMS is a software that allows creation, definition and manipulation of database, allowing users to store, process and analyse data easily. DBMS
provides us with an interface or a tool, to perform various operations like creating database, storing data in it, updating data, creating tables in the
database and a lot more.
DBMS also provides protection and security to the databases. It also maintains data consistency in case of multiple users.
Here are some examples of popular DBMS used these days:

 MySql
 Oracle
 SQL Server
 IBM DB2
 PostgreSQL
 Amazon SimpleDB (cloud based) etc.

Characteristics of Database Management System

A database management system has following characteristics:

1. Data stored into Tables: Data is never directly stored into the database. Data is stored into tables, created inside the database. DBMS also
allows to have relationships between tables which makes the data more meaningful and connected. You can easily understand what type of
data is stored where by looking at all the tables created in a database.
2. Reduced Redundancy: In the modern world hard drives are very cheap, but earlier when hard drives were too expensive, unnecessary
repetition of data in database was a big problem. But DBMS follows Normalisation which divides the data in such a way that repetition is
minimum.
3. Data Consistency: On Live data, i.e. data that is being continuosly updated and added, maintaining the consistency of data can become a
challenge. But DBMS handles it all by itself.
4. Support Multiple user and Concurrent Access: DBMS allows multiple users to work on it(update, insert, delete data) at the same time and
still manages to maintain the data consistency.
5. Query Language: DBMS provides users with a simple Query language, using which data can be easily fetched, inserted, deleted and
updated in a database.
 6. Security: The DBMS also takes care of the security of data, protecting the data from un-authorised access. In a typical DBMS, we can create
user accounts with different access permissions, using which we can easily secure our data by restricting user access.
7. DBMS supports transactions, which allows us to better handle and manage data integrity in real world applications where multi-threading is
extensively used.

Advantages of DBMS

 Segregation of applicaion program.

 Minimal data duplicacy or data redundancy.
 Easy retrieval of data using the Query Language.
 Reduced development time and maintainance need.
 With Cloud Datacenters, we now have Database Management Systems capable of storing almost infinite data.
 Seamless integration into the application programming languages which makes it very easier to add a database to almost any application or
website.

Disadvantages of DBMS

 It's Complexity
 Except MySQL, which is open source, licensed DBMSs are generally costly.
 They are large in size.

Components of DBMS
The database management system can be divided into five major components, they are:

1. Hardware
2. Software
3. Data
4. Procedures
5. Database Access Language

Let's have a simple diagram to see how they all fit together to form a database management system.
DBMS Components: Hardware
When we say Hardware, we mean computer, hard disks, I/O channels for data, and any other physical component involved before any data is
successfully stored into the memory.
When we run Oracle or MySQL on our personal computer, then our computer's Hard Disk, our Keyboard using which we type in all the commands, our
computer's RAM, ROM all become a part of the DBMS hardware.

DBMS Components: Software

This is the main component, as this is the program which controls everything. The DBMS software is more like a wrapper around the physical database,
which provides us with an easy-to-use interface to store, access and update data.
The DBMS software is capable of understanding the Database Access Language and intrepret it into actual database commands to execute them on the
DB.

DBMS Components: Data

Data is that resource, for which DBMS was designed. The motive behind the creation of DBMS was to store and utilise data.
In a typical Database, the user saved Data is present and meta data is stored.
Metadata is data about the data. This is information stored by the DBMS to better understand the data stored in it.
For example: When I store my Name in a database, the DBMS will store when the name was stored in the database, what is the size of the name, is it
stored as related data to some other data, or is it independent, all this information is metadata.

DBMS Components: Procedures

Procedures refer to general instructions to use a database management system. This includes procedures to setup and install a DBMS, To login and
logout of DBMS software, to manage databases, to take backups, generating reports etc.
DBMS Components: Database Access Language
Database Access Language is a simple language designed to write commands to access, insert, update and delete data stored in any database.
A user can write commands in the Database Access Language and submit it to the DBMS for execution, which is then translated and executed by the
DBMS.
User can create new databases, tables, insert data, fetch stored data, update data and delete the data using the access language.

Users

 Database Administrators: Database Administrator or DBA is the one who manages the complete database management system. DBA takes
care of the security of the DBMS, it's availability, managing the license keys, managing user accounts and access etc.
 Application Programmer or Software Developer: This user group is involved in developing and desiging the parts of DBMS.
 End User: These days all the modern applications, web or mobile, store user data. How do you think they do it? Yes, applications are
programmed in such a way that they collect user data and store the data on DBMS systems running on their server. End users are the one
who store, retrieve, update and delete data.

Understanding DBMS Architecture

A Database Management system is not always directly available for users and applications to access and store data in it. A Database Management
system can be centralised(all the data stored at one location), decentralised(multiple copies of database at different locations) or hierarchical,
depending upon its architecture.
1-tier DBMS architecture also exist, this is when the database is directly available to the user for using it to store data. Generally such a setup is used
for local application development, where programmers communicate directly with the database for quick response.
Database Architecture is logically of two types:

1. 2-tier DBMS architecture

2. 3-tier DBMS architecture

2-tier DBMS Architecture

2-tier DBMS architecture includes an Application layer between the user and the DBMS, which is responsible to communicate the user's request to the
database management system and then send the response from the DBMS to the user.
An application interface known as ODBC(Open Database Connectivity) provides an API that allow client side program to call the DBMS. Most DBMS
vendors provide ODBC drivers for their DBMS.
Such an architecture provides the DBMS extra security as it is not exposed to the End User directly. Also, security can be improved by adding security
and authentication checks in the Application layer too.

3-tier DBMS Architecture

3-tier DBMS architecture is the most commonly used architecture for web applications.

It is an extension of the 2-tier architecture. In the 2-tier architecture, we have an application layer which can be accessed programatically to perform
various operations on the DBMS. The application generally understands the Database Access Language and processes end users requests to the
DBMS.
In 3-tier architecture, an additional Presentation or GUI Layer is added, which provides a graphical user interface for the End user to interact with the
DBMS.
For the end user, the GUI layer is the Database System, and the end user has no idea about the application layer and the DBMS system.
If you have used MySQL, then you must have seen PHPMyAdmin, it is the best example of a 3-tier DBMS architecture.

DBMS Database Models

A Database model defines the logical design and structure of a database and defines how data will be stored, accessed and updated in a database
management system. While the Relational Model is the most widely used database model, there are other models too:

 Hierarchical Model
 Network Model
 Entity-relationship Model
 Relational Model

Hierarchical Model
This database model organises data into a tree-like-structure, with a single root, to which all the other data is linked. The heirarchy starts from
the Root data, and expands like a tree, adding child nodes to the parent nodes.
In this model, a child node will only have a single parent node.
This model efficiently describes many real-world relationships like index of a book, recipes etc.
In hierarchical model, data is organised into tree-like structure with one one-to-many relationship between two different types of data, for example, one
department can have many courses, many professors and of-course many students.

Network Model
This is an extension of the Hierarchical model. In this model data is organised more like a graph, and are allowed to have more than one parent node.
In this database model data is more related as more relationships are established in this database model. Also, as the data is more related, hence
accessing the data is also easier and fast. This database model was used to map many-to-many data relationships.
This was the most widely used database model, before Relational Model was introduced.

Entity-relationship Model
In this database model, relationships are created by dividing object of interest into entity and its characteristics into attributes.
Different entities are related using relationships.
E-R Models are defined to represent the relationships into pictorial form to make it easier for different stakeholders to understand.
This model is good to design a database, which can then be turned into tables in relational model(explained below).
Let's take an example, If we have to design a School Database, then Student will be an entity with attributes name, age, address etc. As Address is
generally complex, it can be another entity with attributes street name, pincode, city etc, and there will be a relationship between them.
Relationships can also be of different types. To learn about E-R Diagrams in details, click on the link.

Relational Model
In this model, data is organised in two-dimensional tables and the relationship is maintained by storing a common field.
This model was introduced by E.F Codd in 1970, and since then it has been the most widely used database model, infact, we can say the only database
model used around the world.
The basic structure of data in the relational model is tables. All the information related to a particular type is stored in rows of that table.
Hence, tables are also known as relations in relational model.
In the coming tutorials we will learn how to design tables, normalize them to reduce data redundancy and how to use Structured Query language to
access data from tables.
Basic Concepts of ER Model in DBMS
As we described in the tutorial Database models, Entity-relationship model is a model used for design and representation of relationships between data.
The main data objects are termed as Entities, with their details defined as attributes, some of these attributes are important and are used to identity the
entity, and different entities are related using relationships.
In short, to understand about the ER Model, we must understand about:

 Entity and Entity Set

 What are Attributes? And Types of Attributes.
 Keys
 Relationships

Let's take an example to explain everything. For a School Management Software, we will have to
store Student information, Teacher information, Classes, Subjects taught in each class etc.

ER Model: Entity and Entity Set

Considering the above example, Student is an entity, Teacher is an entity, similarly, Class, Subject etc are also entities.
An Entity is generally a real-world object which has characteristics and holds relationships in a DBMS.
If a Student is an Entity, then the complete dataset of all the students will be the Entity Set

ER Model: Attributes
If a Student is an Entity, then student's roll no., student's name, student's age, student's gender etc will be its attributes.
An attribute can be of many types, here are different types of attributes defined in ER database model:

1. Simple attribute: The attributes with values that are atomic and cannot be broken down further are simple attributes. For example,
student's age.
2. Composite attribute: A composite attribute is made up of more than one simple attribute. For example, student's address will contain, house
no., street name, pincode etc.
3. Derived attribute: These are the attributes which are not present in the whole database management system, but are derived using other
attributes. For example, average age of students in a class.
4. Single-valued attribute: As the name suggests, they have a single value.
5. Multi-valued attribute: And, they can have multiple values.

ER Model: Keys
If the attribute roll no. can uniquely identify a student entity, amongst all the students, then the attribute roll no. will be said to be a key.
Following are the types of Keys:

1. Super Key
2. Candidate Key
3. Primary Key

We have covered Keys in details here in Database Keys tutorial.

ER Model: Relationships
When an Entity is related to another Entity, they are said to have a relationship. For example, A Class Entity is related to Student entity, becasue
students study in classes, hence this is a relationship.
Depending upon the number of entities involved, a degree is assigned to relationships.
For example, if 2 entities are involved, it is said to be Binary relationship, if 3 entities are involved, it is said to be Ternary relationship, and so on.

In the next tutorial, we will learn how to create ER diagrams and design databases using ER diagrams.

Working with ER Diagrams

ER Diagram is a visual representation of data that describes how data is related to each other. In ER Model, we disintegrate data into entities, attributes
and setup relationships between entities, all this can be represented visually using the ER diagram.
For example, in the below diagram, anyone can see and understand what the diagram wants to convey: Developer develops a website, whereas a
Visitor visits a website.

Components of ER Diagram
Entitiy, Attributes, Relationships etc form the components of ER Diagram and there are defined symbols and shapes to represent each one of them.
Let's see how we can represent these in our ER Diagram.

Entity
Simple rectangular box represents an Entity.

Relationships between Entities - Weak and Strong

Rhombus is used to setup relationships between two or more entities.
Attributes for any Entity
Ellipse is used to represent attributes of any entity. It is connected to the entity.

Weak Entity
A weak Entity is represented using double rectangular boxes. It is generally connected to another entity.

Key Attribute for any Entity

To represent a Key attribute, the attribute name inside the Ellipse is underlined.

Derived Attribute for any Entity

Derived attributes are those which are derived based on other attributes, for example, age can be derived from date of birth.
To represent a derived attribute, another dotted ellipse is created inside the main ellipse.

Multivalued Attribute for any Entity

Double Ellipse, one inside another, represents the attribute which can have multiple values.

Composite Attribute for any Entity

A composite attribute is the attribute, which also has attributes.
ER Diagram: Entity
An Entity can be any object, place, person or class. In ER Diagram, an entity is represented using rectangles. Consider an example of an Organisation-
Employee, Manager, Department, Product and many more can be taken as entities in an Organisation.

The yellow rhombus in between represents a relationship.

ER Diagram: Weak Entity

Weak entity is an entity that depends on another entity. Weak entity doesn't have anay key attribute of its own. Double rectangle is used to represent a
weak entity.
ER Diagram: Attribute
An Attribute describes a property or characterstic of an entity. For example, Name, Age, Address etc can be attributes of a Student. An attribute is
represented using eclipse.

ER Diagram: Key Attribute

Key attribute represents the main characterstic of an Entity. It is used to represent a Primary key. Ellipse with the text underlined, represents Key
Attribute.
ER Diagram: Composite Attribute
An attribute can also have their own attributes. These attributes are known as Composite attributes.

ER Diagram: Relationship
A Relationship describes relation between entities. Relationship is represented using diamonds or rhombus.
There are three types of relationship that exist between Entities.

1. Binary Relationship
2. Recursive Relationship
3. Ternary Relationship

ER Diagram: Binary Relationship

Binary Relationship means relation between two Entities. This is further divided into three types.

One to One Relationship

This type of relationship is rarely seen in real world.

The above example describes that one student can enroll only for one course and a course will also have only one Student. This is not what you will
usually see in real-world relationships.
One to Many Relationship
The below example showcases this relationship, which means that 1 student can opt for many courses, but a course can only have 1 student. Sounds
weird! This is how it is.

Many to One Relationship

It reflects business rule that many entities can be associated with just one entity. For example, Student enrolls for only one Course but a Course can
have many Students.
Many to Many Relationship

The above diagram represents that one student can enroll for more than one courses. And a course can have more than 1 student enrolled in it.

ER Diagram: Recursive Relationship

When an Entity is related with itself it is known as Recursive Relationship.

ER Diagram: Ternary Relationship

Relationship of degree three is called Ternary relationship.
A Ternary relationship involves three entities. In such relationships we always consider two entites together and then look upon the third.
For example, in the diagram above, we have three related entities, Company, Product and Sector. To understand the relationship better or to define
rules around the model, we should relate two entities and then derive the third one.
A Company produces many Products/ each product is produced by exactly one company.
A Company operates in only one Sector / each sector has many companies operating in it.
Considering the above two rules or relationships, we see that although the complete relationship involves three entities, but we are looking at two entities
at a time.

The Enhanced ER Model

As the complexity of data increased in the late 1980s, it became more and more difficult to use the traditional ER Model for database modelling. Hence
some improvements or enhancements were made to the existing ER Model to make it able to handle the complex applications better.
Hence, as part of the Enhanced ER Model, along with other improvements, three new concepts were added to the existing ER Model, they were:

1. Generalization
2. Specialization
3. Aggregration

Let's understand what they are, and why were they added to the existing ER Model.

Generalization
Generalization is a bottom-up approach in which two lower level entities combine to form a higher level entity. In generalization, the higher level entity
can also combine with other lower level entities to make further higher level entity.
It's more like Superclass and Subclass system, but the only difference is the approach, which is bottom-up. Hence, entities are combined to form a more
generalised entity, in other words, sub-classes are combined to form a super-class.
For example, Saving and Current account types entities can be generalised and an entity with name Account can be created, which covers both.

Specialization
Specialization is opposite to Generalization. It is a top-down approach in which one higher level entity can be broken down into two lower level entity. In
specialization, a higher level entity may not have any lower-level entity sets, it's possible.
Aggregration
Aggregration is a process when relation between two entities is treated as a single entity.

In the diagram above, the relationship between Center and Course together, is acting as an Entity, which is in relationship with another entity Visitor.
Now in real world, if a Visitor or a Student visits a Coaching Center, he/she will never enquire about the center only or just about the course, rather
he/she will ask enquire about both.

Codd's Rule for Relational DBMS

E.F Codd was a Computer Scientist who invented the Relational model for Database management. Based on relational model, the Relational
database was created. Codd proposed 13 rules popularly known as Codd's 12 rules to test DBMS's concept against his relational model. Codd's rule
actualy define what quality a DBMS requires in order to become a Relational Database Management System(RDBMS). Till now, there is hardly any
commercial product that follows all the 13 Codd's rules. Even Oracle follows only eight and half(8.5) out of 13. The Codd's 12 rules are as follows.

Rule zero
This rule states that for a system to qualify as an RDBMS, it must be able to manage database entirely through the relational capabilities.

Rule 1: Information rule

All information(including metadata) is to be represented as stored data in cells of tables. The rows and columns have to be strictly unordered.

Rule 2: Guaranted Access

Each unique piece of data(atomic value) should be accesible by : Table Name + Primary Key(Row) + Attribute(column).
NOTE: Ability to directly access via POINTER is a violation of this rule.
Rule 3: Systematic treatment of NULL
Null has several meanings, it can mean missing data, not applicable or no value. It should be handled consistently. Also, Primary key must not be null,
ever. Expression on NULL must give null.

Rule 4: Active Online Catalog

Database dictionary(catalog) is the structure description of the complete Database and it must be stored online. The Catalog must be governed by same
rules as rest of the database. The same query language should be used on catalog as used to query database.

Rule 5: Powerful and Well-Structured Language

One well structured language must be there to provide all manners of access to the data stored in the database. Example: SQL, etc. If the database
allows access to the data without the use of this language, then that is a violation.

Rule 6: View Updation Rule

All the view that are theoretically updatable should be updatable by the system as well.

Rule 7: Relational Level Operation

There must be Insert, Delete, Update operations at each level of relations. Set operation like Union, Intersection and minus should also be supported.

Rule 8: Physical Data Independence

The physical storage of data should not matter to the system. If say, some file supporting table is renamed or moved from one disk to another, it should
not effect the application.

Rule 9: Logical Data Independence

If there is change in the logical structure(table structures) of the database the user view of data should not change. Say, if a table is split into two tables,
a new view should give result as the join of the two tables. This rule is most difficult to satisfy.

Rule 10: Integrity Independence

The database should be able to enforce its own integrity rather than using other programs. Key and Check constraints, trigger etc, should be stored in
Data Dictionary. This also make RDBMS independent of front-end.

Rule 11: Distribution Independence

A database should work properly regardless of its distribution across a network. Even if a database is geographically distributed, with data stored in
pieces, the end user should get an impression that it is stored at the same place. This lays the foundation of distributed database.
Rule 12: Nonsubversion Rule
If low level access is allowed to a system it should not be able to subvert or bypass integrity rules to change the data. This can be achieved by some sort
of looking or encryption.

Basic Relational DBMS Concepts

A Relational Database management System(RDBMS) is a database management system based on the relational model introduced by E.F Codd. In
relational model, data is stored in relations(tables) and is represented in form of tuples(rows).
RDBMS is used to manage Relational database. Relational database is a collection of organized set of tables related to each other, and from which
data can be accessed easily. Relational Database is the most commonly used database these days.

RDBMS: What is Table ?

In Relational database model, a table is a collection of data elements organised in terms of rows and columns. A table is also considered as a
convenient representation of relations. But a table can have duplicate row of data while a true relation cannot have duplicate data. Table is the most
simplest form of data storage. Below is an example of an Employee table.

ID Name Age Salary

1 Adam 34 13000

2 Alex 28 15000

3 Stuart 20 18000

4 Ross 42 19020

RDBMS: What is a Tuple?

A single entry in a table is called a Tuple or Record or Row. A tuple in a table represents a set of related data. For example, the above Employee table
has 4 tuples/records/rows.
Following is an example of single record or tuple.

1 Adam 34 13000

RDBMS: What is an Attribute?

A table consists of several records(row), each record can be broken down into several smaller parts of data known as Attributes. The
above Employee table consist of four attributes, ID, Name, Age and Salary.

Attribute Domain
When an attribute is defined in a relation(table), it is defined to hold only a certain type of values, which is known as Attribute Domain.
Hence, the attribute Name will hold the name of employee for every tuple. If we save employee's address there, it will be violation of the Relational
database model.
 Name

Adam

Alex

Stuart - 9/401, OC Street,

Amsterdam

Ross

What is a Relation Schema?

A relation schema describes the structure of the relation, with the name of the relation(name of table), its attributes and their names and type.

What is a Relation Key?

A relation key is an attribute which can uniquely identify a particular tuple(row) in a relation(table).

Relational Integrity Constraints

Every relation in a relational database model should abide by or follow a few constraints to be a valid relation, these constraints are called as Relational
Integrity Constraints.
The three main Integrity Constraints are:

1. Key Constraints
2. Domain Constraints
3. Referential integrity Constraints

Key Constraints
We store data in tables, to later access it whenever required. In every table one or more than one attributes together are used to fetch data from tables.
The Key Constraint specifies that there should be such an attribute(column) in a relation(table), which can be used to fetch data for any tuple(row).
The Key attribute should never be NULL or same for two different row of data.
For example, in the Employee table we can use the attribute ID to fetch data for each of the employee. No value of ID is null and it is unique for every
row, hence it can be our Key attribute.

Domain Constraint
Domain constraints refers to the rules defined for the values that can be stored for a certain attribute.
Like we explained above, we cannot store Address of employee in the column for Name.
Similarly, a mobile number cannot exceed 10 digits.
Referential Integrity Constraint
We will study about this in detail later. For now remember this example, if I say Supriya is my girlfriend, then a girl with name Supriya should also exist
for that relationship to be present.
If a table reference to some data from another table, then that table and that data should be present for referential integrity constraint to hold true.

Introduction to Database Keys

Keys are very important part of Relational database model. They are used to establish and identify relationships between tables and also to uniquely
identify any record or row of data inside a table.
A Key can be a single attribute or a group of attributes, where the combination may act as a key.
The video below covers all about the different keys in an RDBMS.

Why we need a Key?

In real world applications, number of tables required for storing the data is huge, and the different tables are related to each other as well.
Also, tables store a lot of data in them. Tables generally extends to thousands of records stored in them, unsorted and unorganised.
Now to fetch any particular record from such dataset, you will have to apply some conditions, but what if there is duplicate data present and every time
you try to fetch some data by applying certain condition, you get the wrong data. How many trials before you get the right data?
To avoid all this, Keys are defined to easily identify any row of data in a table.
Let's try to understand about all the keys using a simple example.

student_id name phone age

1 Akon 9876723452 17

2 Akon 9991165674 19

3 Bkon 7898756543 18

4 Ckon 8987867898 19

5 Dkon 9990080080 17

Let's take a simple Student table, with fields student_id, name, phone and age.

Super Key
Super Key is defined as a set of attributes within a table that can uniquely identify each record within a table. Super Key is a superset of Candidate key.
In the table defined above super key would include student_id, (student_id, name), phone etc.

Confused? The first one is pretty simple as student_id is unique for every row of data, hence it can be used to identity each row uniquely.
Next comes, (student_id, name), now name of two students can be same, but their student_id can't be same hence this combination can also be a
key.
Similarly, phone number for every student will be unique, hence again, phone can also be a key.
So they all are super keys.

Candidate Key
Candidate keys are defined as the minimal set of fields which can uniquely identify each record in a table. It is an attribute or a set of attributes that can
act as a Primary Key for a table to uniquely identify each record in that table. There can be more than one candidate key.
In our example, student_id and phone both are candidate keys for table Student.

 A candiate key can never be NULL or empty. And its value should be unique.
 There can be more than one candidate keys for a table.
  A candidate key can be a combination of more than one columns(attributes).

Primary Key
Primary key is a candidate key that is most appropriate to become the main key for any table. It is a key that can uniquely identify each record in a table.

For the table Student we can make the student_id column as the primary key.

Composite Key
Key that consists of two or more attributes that uniquely identify any record in a table is called Composite key. But the attributes which together form
the Composite key are not a key independentely or individually.

In the above picture we have a Score table which stores the marks scored by a student in a particular subject.
In this table student_id and subject_id together will form the primary key, hence it is a composite key.

Secondary or Alternative key

The candidate key which are not selected as primary key are known as secondary keys or alternative keys.

Non-key Attributes
Non-key attributes are the attributes or fields of a table, other than candidate key attributes/fields in a table.

Non-prime Attributes
Non-prime Attributes are attributes other than Primary Key attribute(s)..

Normalization of Database
Database Normalization is a technique of organizing the data in the database. Normalization is a systematic approach of decomposing tables to
eliminate data redundancy(repetition) and undesirable characteristics like Insertion, Update and Deletion Anomalies. It is a multi-step process that puts
data into tabular form, removing duplicated data from the relation tables.
Normalization is used for mainly two purposes,

 Eliminating redundant(useless) data.

 Ensuring data dependencies make sense i.e data is logically stored.

The video below will give you a good overview of Database Normalization. If you want you can skip the video, as the concept is covered in detail, below
the video.

Problems Without Normalization

If a table is not properly normalized and have data redundancy then it will not only eat up extra memory space but will also make it difficult to handle and
update the database, without facing data loss. Insertion, Updation and Deletion Anomalies are very frequent if database is not normalized. To
understand these anomalies let us take an example of a Student table.

rollno name branch hod office_tel

401 Akon CSE Mr. X 53337

402 Bkon CSE Mr. X 53337

403 Ckon CSE Mr. X 53337

404 Dkon CSE Mr. X 53337

In the table above, we have data of 4 Computer Sci. students. As we can see, data for the fields branch, hod(Head of Department) and office_tel is
repeated for the students who are in the same branch in the college, this is Data Redundancy.
Insertion Anomaly
Suppose for a new admission, until and unless a student opts for a branch, data of the student cannot be inserted, or else we will have to set the branch
information as NULL.
Also, if we have to insert data of 100 students of same branch, then the branch information will be repeated for all those 100 students.
These scenarios are nothing but Insertion anomalies.

Updation Anomaly
What if Mr. X leaves the college? or is no longer the HOD of computer science department? In that case all the student records will have to be updated,
and if by mistake we miss any record, it will lead to data inconsistency. This is Updation anomaly.

Deletion Anomaly
In our Student table, two different informations are kept together, Student information and Branch information. Hence, at the end of the academic year,
if student records are deleted, we will also lose the branch information. This is Deletion anomaly.

Normalization Rule
Normalization rules are divided into the following normal forms:

1. First Normal Form

2. Second Normal Form
3. Third Normal Form
4. BCNF
5. Fourth Normal Form

First Normal Form (1NF)

For a table to be in the First Normal Form, it should follow the following 4 rules:

1. It should only have single(atomic) valued attributes/columns.

2. Values stored in a column should be of the same domain
3. All the columns in a table should have unique names.
4. And the order in which data is stored, does not matter.

In the next tutorial, we will discuss about the First Normal Form in details.

Second Normal Form (2NF)

For a table to be in the Second Normal Form,

1. It should be in the First Normal form.

2. And, it should not have Partial Dependency.

To understand what is Partial Dependency and how to normalize a table to 2nd normal for, jump to the Second Normal Form tutorial.
Third Normal Form (3NF)
A table is said to be in the Third Normal Form when,

1. It is in the Second Normal form.

2. And, it doesn't have Transitive Dependency.

Here is the Third Normal Form tutorial. But we suggest you to first study about the second normal form and then head over to the third normal form.

Boyce and Codd Normal Form (BCNF)

Boyce and Codd Normal Form is a higher version of the Third Normal form. This form deals with certain type of anomaly that is not handled by 3NF. A
3NF table which does not have multiple overlapping candidate keys is said to be in BCNF. For a table to be in BCNF, following conditions must be
satisfied:

 R must be in 3rd Normal Form

 and, for each functional dependency ( X → Y ), X should be a super Key.

To learn about BCNF in detail with a very easy to understand example, head to Boye-Codd Normal Form tutorial.

Fourth Normal Form (4NF)

A table is said to be in the Fourth Normal Form when,

1. It is in the Boyce-Codd Normal Form.

2. And, it doesn't have Multi-Valued Dependency.

Here is the Fourth Normal Form tutorial. But we suggest you to understand other normal forms before you head over to the fourth normal form.

What is First Normal Form (1NF)?

In this tutorial we will learn about the 1st(First) Normal Form which is more like the Step 1 of the Normalization process. The 1st Normal form expects
you to design your table in such a way that it can easily be extended and it is easier for you to retrieve data from it whenever required.
In our last tutorial we learned and understood how data redundancy or repetition can lead to several issues like Insertion, Deletion and Updation
anomalies and how Normalization can reduce data redundancy and make the data more meaningful.

If tables in a database are not even in the 1st Normal Form, it is considered as bad database design.

Rules for First Normal Form

The first normal form expects you to follow a few simple rules while designing your database, and they are:

Rule 1: Single Valued Attributes

Each column of your table should be single valued which means they should not contain multiple values. We will explain this with help of an example
later, let's see the other rules for now.
Rule 2: Attribute Domain should not change
This is more of a "Common Sense" rule. In each column the values stored must be of the same kind or type.
For example: If you have a column dob to save date of births of a set of people, then you cannot or you must not save 'names' of some of them in that
column along with 'date of birth' of others in that column. It should hold only 'date of birth' for all the records/rows.

Rule 3: Unique name for Attributes/Columns

This rule expects that each column in a table should have a unique name. This is to avoid confusion at the time of retrieving data or performing any other
operation on the stored data.
If one or more columns have same name, then the DBMS system will be left confused.

Rule 4: Order doesn't matters

This rule says that the order in which you store the data in your table doesn't matter.

Time for an Example

Although all the rules are self explanatory still let's take an example where we will create a table to store student data which will have student's roll no.,
their name and the name of subjects they have opted for.
Here is our table, with some sample data added to it.

roll_no name subject

101 Akon OS, CN

103 Ckon Java

102 Bkon C, C++

Our table already satisfies 3 rules out of the 4 rules, as all our column names are unique, we have stored data in the order we wanted to and we have
not inter-mixed different type of data in columns.
But out of the 3 different students in our table, 2 have opted for more than 1 subject. And we have stored the subject names in a single column. But as
per the 1st Normal form each column must contain atomic value.

How to solve this Problem?

It's very simple, because all we have to do is break the values into atomic values.
Here is our updated table and it now satisfies the First Normal Form.

roll_no name subject

101 Akon OS

101 Akon CN

103 Ckon Java

102 Bkon C
 102 Bkon C++

By doing so, although a few values are getting repeated but values for the subject column are now atomic for each record/row.
Using the First Normal Form, data redundancy increases, as there will be many columns with same data in multiple rows but each row as a whole will be
unique.

What is Second Normal Form?

For a table to be in the Second Normal Form, it must satisfy two conditions:

1. The table should be in the First Normal Form.

2. There should be no Partial Dependency.

If you want you can skip the video, as the concept is covered in detail below the video.

What is Partial Dependency? Do not worry about it. First let's understand what is Dependency in a table?

What is Dependency?
Let's take an example of a Student table with columns student_id, name, reg_no(registration
number), branch and address(student's home address).

student_id name reg_no branch address

In this table, student_id is the primary key and will be unique for every row, hence we can use student_id to fetch
any row of data from this table
Even for a case, where student names are same, if we know the student_id we can easily fetch the correct record.

student_id name reg_no branch address

10 Akon 07-WY CSE Kerala

11 Akon 08-WY IT Gujarat

Hence we can say a Primary Key for a table is the column or a group of columns(composite key) which can
uniquely identify each record in the table.
I can ask from branch name of student with student_id 10, and I can get it. Similarly, if I ask for name of student
with student_id 10 or 11, I will get it. So all I need is student_id and every other column depends on it, or can be
fetched using it.
This is Dependency and we also call it Functional Dependency.
What is Partial Dependency?
Now that we know what dependency is, we are in a better state to understand what partial dependency is.
For a simple table like Student, a single column like student_id can uniquely identfy all the records in a table.
But this is not true all the time. So now let's extend our example to see if more than 1 column together can act as
a primary key.
Let's create another table for Subject, which will have subject_id and subject_name fields and subject_id will be the
primary key.

subject_id subject_name

1 Java

2 C++

3 Php

Now we have a Student table with student information and another table Subject for storing subject
information.
Let's create another table Score, to store the marks obtained by students in the respective subjects. We will also
be saving name of the teacher who teaches that subject along with marks.

score_id student_id subject_id marks teacher

1 10 1 70 Java Teacher

2 10 2 75 C++ Teacher

3 11 1 80 Java Teacher

In the score table we are saving the student_id to know which student's marks are these and subject_id to
know for which subject the marks are for.
Together, student_id + subject_id forms a Candidate Key(learn about Database Keys) for this table, which can be
the Primary key.
Confused, How this combination can be a primary key?
See, if I ask you to get me marks of student with student_id 10, can you get it from this table? No, because you
don't know for which subject. And if I give you subject_id, you would not know for which student. Hence we
need student_id + subject_id to uniquely identify any row.

But where is Partial Dependency?

Now if you look at the Score table, we have a column names teacher which is only dependent on the subject, for
Java it's Java Teacher and for C++ it's C++ Teacher & so on.
Now as we just discussed that the primary key for this table is a composition of two columns which
is student_id & subject_id but the teacher's name only depends on subject, hence the subject_id, and has nothing to
do with student_id.
This is Partial Dependency, where an attribute in a table depends on only a part of the primary key and not on
the whole key.

How to remove Partial Dependency?

There can be many different solutions for this, but out objective is to remove teacher's name from Score table.
The simplest solution is to remove columns teacher from Score table and add it to the Subject table. Hence, the
Subject table will become:

subject_id subject_name teacher

1 Java Java Teacher

2 C++ C++ Teacher

3 Php Php Teacher

And our Score table is now in the second normal form, with no partial dependency.

score_id student_id subject_id marks

1 10 1 70

2 10 2 75

3 11 1 80

Quick Recap

1. For a table to be in the Second Normal form, it should be in the First Normal form and it should not have Partial
Dependency.
2. Partial Dependency exists, when for a composite primary key, any attribute in the table depends only on a part
of the primary key and not on the complete primary key.
3. To remove Partial dependency, we can divide the table, remove the attribute which is causing partial
dependency, and move it to some other table where it fits in well.

Third Normal Form (3NF)

Third Normal Form is an upgrade to Second Normal Form. When a table is in the Second Normal Form and has no transitive dependency, then it is in
the Third Normal Form.
The video below covers the concept of Third Normal Form in details.

In our last tutorial, we learned about the second normal form and even normalized our Score table into the 2nd Normal Form.
So let's use the same example, where we have 3 tables, Student, Subject and Score.

Student Table

student_id name reg_no branch address

10 Akon 07-WY CSE Kerala

11 Akon 08-WY IT Gujarat

12 Bkon 09-WY IT Rajasthan

Subject Table

subject_id subject_name teacher

1 Java Java Teacher

2 C++ C++ Teacher

3 Php Php Teacher

Score Table

score_id student_id subject_id marks

1 10 1 70

2 10 2 75

3 11 1 80

In the Score table, we need to store some more information, which is the exam name and total marks, so let's add 2 more columns to the Score table.

score_id student_id subject_id marks exam_name total_marks

Requirements for Third Normal Form

For a table to be in the third normal form,

1. It should be in the Second Normal form.

2. And it should not have Transitive Dependency.

What is Transitive Dependency?

With exam_name and total_marks added to our Score table, it saves more data now. Primary key for our Score table is a composite key, which means
it's made up of two attributes or columns → student_id + subject_id.
Our new column exam_name depends on both student and subject. For example, a mechanical engineering student will have Workshop exam but a
computer science student won't. And for some subjects you have Prctical exams and for some you don't. So we can say that exam_name is dependent on
both student_id and subject_id.
And what about our second new column total_marks? Does it depend on our Score table's primary key?
Well, the column total_marks depends on exam_name as with exam type the total score changes. For example, practicals are of less marks while theory
exams are of more marks.
But, exam_name is just another column in the score table. It is not a primary key or even a part of the primary key, and total_marks depends on it.
This is Transitive Dependency. When a non-prime attribute depends on other non-prime attributes rather than depending upon the prime attributes or
primary key.

How to remove Transitive Dependency?

Again the solution is very simple. Take out the columns exam_name and total_marks from Score table and put them in an Exam table and use
the exam_id wherever required.

Score Table: In 3rd Normal Form

score_id student_id subject_id marks exam_id

The new Exam table

exam_id exam_name total_marks

1 Workshop 200

2 Mains 70

3 Practicals 30

Advantage of removing Transitive Dependency

The advantage of removing transitive dependency is,

 Amount of data duplication is reduced.

 Data integrity achieved.

Boyce-Codd Normal Form (BCNF)

Boyce-Codd Normal Form or BCNF is an extension to the third normal form, and is also known as 3.5 Normal Form.
Follow the video above for complete explanation of BCNF. Or, if you want, you can even skip the video and jump to the section below for the complete
tutorial.
In our last tutorial, we learned about the third normal form and we also learned how to remove transitive dependency from a table, we suggest you to
follow the last tutorial before this one.

Rules for BCNF

For a table to satisfy the Boyce-Codd Normal Form, it should satisfy the following two conditions:

1. It should be in the Third Normal Form.

2. And, for any dependency A → B, A should be a super key.

The second point sounds a bit tricky, right? In simple words, it means, that for a dependency A → B, A cannot be a non-prime attribute, if B is a prime
attribute.

Time for an Example

Below we have a college enrolment table with columns student_id, subject and professor.

student_id subject professor

101 Java P.Java

101 C++ P.Cpp

102 Java P.Java2

103 C# P.Chash

104 Java P.Java

As you can see, we have also added some sample data to the table.
In the table above:

 One student can enrol for multiple subjects. For example, student with student_id 101, has opted for subjects - Java & C++
 For each subject, a professor is assigned to the student.
 And, there can be multiple professors teaching one subject like we have for Java.

What do you think should be the Primary Key?

Well, in the table above student_id, subject together form the primary key, because using student_id and subject, we can find all the columns of
the table.
One more important point to note here is, one professor teaches only one subject, but one subject may have two different professors.
Hence, there is a dependency between subject and professor here, where subject depends on the professor name.
This table satisfies the 1st Normal form because all the values are atomic, column names are unique and all the values stored in a particular column
are of same domain.
This table also satisfies the 2nd Normal Form as their is no Partial Dependency.
And, there is no Transitive Dependency, hence the table also satisfies the 3rd Normal Form.
But this table is not in Boyce-Codd Normal Form.
Why this table is not in BCNF?
In the table above, student_id, subject form primary key, which means subject column is a prime attribute.
But, there is one more dependency, professor → subject.
And while subject is a prime attribute, professor is a non-prime attribute, which is not allowed by BCNF.

How to satisfy BCNF?

To make this relation(table) satisfy BCNF, we will decompose this table into two tables, student table and professor table.
Below we have the structure for both the tables.
Student Table

student_id p_id

101 1

101 2

and so on...

And, Professor Table

p_id professor subject

1 P.Java Java

2 P.Cpp C++

and so on...

And now, this relation satisfy Boyce-Codd Normal Form. In the next tutorial we will learn about the Fourth Normal Form.

A more Generic Explanation

In the picture below, we have tried to explain BCNF in terms of relations.
Fourth Normal Form (4NF)
Fourth Normal Form comes into picture when Multi-valued Dependency occur in any relation. In this tutorial we will learn about Multi-valued
Dependency, how to remove it and how to make any table satisfy the fourth normal form.
Follow the video above for complete explanation of 4th Normal Form. Or, if you want, you can even skip the video and jump to the section below for the
complete tutorial.
In our last tutorial, we learned about the boyce-codd normal form, we suggest you to follow the last tutorial before this one.

Rules for 4th Normal Form

For a table to satisfy the Fourth Normal Form, it should satisfy the following two conditions:

1. It should be in the Boyce-Codd Normal Form.

2. And, the table should not have any Multi-valued Dependency.

Let's try to understand what multi-valued dependency is in the next section.

What is Multi-valued Dependency?

A table is said to have multi-valued dependency, if the following conditions are true,

1. For a dependency A → B, if for a single value of A, multiple value of B exists, then the table may have multi-valued dependency.
2. Also, a table should have at-least 3 columns for it to have a multi-valued dependency.
3. And, for a relation R(A,B,C), if there is a multi-valued dependency between, A and B, then B and C should be independent of each other.

If all these conditions are true for any relation(table), it is said to have multi-valued dependency.
Time for an Example
Below we have a college enrolment table with columns s_id, course and hobby.

s_id course hobby

1 Science Cricket

1 Maths Hockey

2 C# Cricket

2 Php Hockey

As you can see in the table above, student with s_id 1 has opted for two courses, Science and Maths, and has two hobbies, Cricket and Hockey.
You must be thinking what problem this can lead to, right?
Well the two records for student with s_id 1, will give rise to two more records, as shown below, because for one student, two hobbies exists, hence
along with both the courses, these hobbies should be specified.

s_id course hobby

1 Science Cricket

1 Maths Hockey

1 Science Hockey

1 Maths Cricket

And, in the table above, there is no relationship between the columns course and hobby. They are independent of each other.
So there is multi-value dependency, which leads to un-necessary repetition of data and other anomalies as well.

How to satisfy 4th Normal Form?

To make the above relation satify the 4th normal form, we can decompose the table into 2 tables.
CourseOpted Table

s_id course

1 Science

1 Maths

2 C#
 2 Php

And, Hobbies Table,

s_id hobby

1 Cricket

1 Hockey

2 Cricket

2 Hockey

Now this relation satisfies the fourth normal form.

A table can also have functional dependency along with multi-valued dependency. In that case, the functionally dependent columns are moved in a
separate table and the multi-valued dependent columns are moved to separate tables.
If you design your database carefully, you can easily avoid these issues.

Introduction to SQL
Structure Query Language(SQL) is a database query language used for storing and managing data in Relational DBMS. SQL was the first commercial
language introduced for E.F Codd's Relational model of database. Today almost all RDBMS(MySql, Oracle, Infomix, Sybase, MS Access) use SQL as
the standard database query language. SQL is used to perform all types of data operations in RDBMS.

SQL Command
SQL defines following ways to manipulate data stored in an RDBMS.

DDL: Data Definition Language

This includes changes to the structure of the table like creation of table, altering table, deleting a table etc.
All DDL commands are auto-committed. That means it saves all the changes permanently in the database.

Command Description

create to create new table or database

alter for alteration

truncate delete data from table

drop to drop a table

 rename to rename a table

DML: Data Manipulation Language

DML commands are used for manipulating the data stored in the table and not the table itself.
DML commands are not auto-committed. It means changes are not permanent to database, they can be rolled back.

Command Description

insert to insert a new row

update to update existing row

delete to delete a row

merge merging two rows or two tables

TCL: Transaction Control Language

These commands are to keep a check on other commands and their affect on the database. These commands can annul changes made by other
commands by rolling the data back to its original state. It can also make any temporary change permanent.

Command Description

commit to permanently save

rollback to undo change

savepoint to save temporarily

DCL: Data Control Language

Data control language are the commands to grant and take back authority from any database user.

Command Description

grant grant permission of right

revoke take back permission.

DQL: Data Query Language
Data query language is used to fetch data from tables based on conditions that we can easily apply.

Command Description

select retrieve records from one or more table

SQL: create command

create is a DDL SQL command used to create a table or a database in relational database management system.

Creating a Database
To create a database in RDBMS, create command is used. Following is the syntax,

CREATE DATABASE <DB_NAME>;

Example for creating Database

CREATE DATABASE Test;
The above command will create a database named Test, which will be an empty schema without any table.
To create tables in this newly created database, we can again use the create command.

Creating a Table
create command can also be used to create tables. Now when we create a table, we have to specify the details of the columns of the tables too. We
can specify the names and datatypes of various columns in the create command itself.
Following is the syntax,

CREATE TABLE <TABLE_NAME>

(
column_name1 datatype1,
column_name2 datatype2,
column_name3 datatype3,
column_name4 datatype4
);
create table command will tell the database system to create a new table with the given table name and column information.

Example for creating Table

CREATE TABLE Student(
student_id INT,
 name VARCHAR(100),
age INT);
The above command will create a new table with name Student in the current database with 3 columns, namely student_id, name and age. Where the
column student_id will only store integer, name will hold upto 100 characters and age will again store only integer value.
If you are currently not logged into your database in which you want to create the table then you can also add the database name along with table name,
using a dot operator .
For example, if we have a database with name Test and we want to create a table Student in it, then we can do so using the following query:

CREATE TABLE Test.Student(

student_id INT,
name VARCHAR(100),
age INT);

Most commonly used datatypes for Table columns

Here we have listed some of the most commonly used datatypes used for columns in tables.

Datatype Use

INT used for columns which will store integer values.

FLOAT used for columns which will store float values.

DOUBLE used for columns which will store float values.

VARCHAR used for columns which will be used to store characters and integers, basically a
string.

CHAR used for columns which will store char values(single character).

DATE used for columns which will store date values.

TEXT used for columns which will store text which is generally long in length. For
example, if you create a table for storing profile information of a social networking
website, then for about me section you can have a column of type TEXT.

SQL: ALTER command

alter command is used for altering the table structure, such as,

 to add a column to existing table

 to rename any existing column
 to change datatype of any column or to modify its size.
 to drop a column from the table.
ALTER Command: Add a new Column
Using ALTER command we can add a column to any existing table. Following is the syntax,

ALTER TABLE table_name ADD(

column_name datatype);
Here is an Example for this,

ALTER TABLE student ADD(

address VARCHAR(200)
);
The above command will add a new column address to the table student, which will hold data of type varchar which is nothing but string, of length 200.

ALTER Command: Add multiple new Columns

Using ALTER command we can even add multiple new columns to any existing table. Following is the syntax,

ALTER TABLE table_name ADD(

column_name1 datatype1,
column-name2 datatype2,
column-name3 datatype3);
Here is an Example for this,

ALTER TABLE student ADD(

father_name VARCHAR(60),
mother_name VARCHAR(60),
dob DATE);
The above command will add three new columns to the student table

ALTER Command: Add Column with default value

ALTER command can add a new column to an existing table with a default value too. The default value is used when no value is inserted in the column.
Following is the syntax,

ALTER TABLE table_name ADD(

column-name1 datatype1 DEFAULT some_value
);
Here is an Example for this,

ALTER TABLE student ADD(

dob DATE DEFAULT '01-Jan-99'
);
The above command will add a new column with a preset default value to the table student.

ALTER Command: Modify an existing Column

ALTER command can also be used to modify data type of any existing column. Following is the syntax,

ALTER TABLE table_name modify(

column_name datatype
);
Here is an Example for this,

ALTER TABLE student MODIFY(

address varchar(300));
Remember we added a new column address in the beginning? The above command will modify the address column of the student table, to now hold
upto 300 characters.

ALTER Command: Rename a Column

Using ALTER command you can rename an existing column. Following is the syntax,

ALTER TABLE table_name RENAME

old_column_name TO new_column_name;
Here is an example for this,

ALTER TABLE student RENAME

address TO location;
The above command will rename address column to location.

ALTER Command: Drop a Column

ALTER command can also be used to drop or remove columns. Following is the syntax,

ALTER TABLE table_name DROP(

column_name);
Here is an example for this,

ALTER TABLE student DROP(

address);
The above command will drop the address column from the table student.

SQL Truncate, Drop or Rename a Table

In this tutorial we will learn about the various DDL commands which are used to re-define the tables.

TRUNCATE command
TRUNCATE command removes all the records from a table. But this command will not destroy the table's structure. When we use TRUNCATE command on
a table its (auto-increment) primary key is also initialized. Following is its syntax,

TRUNCATE TABLE table_name

Here is an example explaining it,

TRUNCATE TABLE student;

The above query will delete all the records from the table student.
In DML commands, we will study about the DELETE command which is also more or less same as the TRUNCATE command. We will also learn about the
difference between the two in that tutorial.
DROP command
DROP command completely removes a table from the database. This command will also destroy the table structure and the data stored in it. Following is
its syntax,

DROP TABLE table_name

Here is an example explaining it,

DROP TABLE student;

The above query will delete the Student table completely. It can also be used on Databases, to delete the complete database. For example, to drop a
database,

DROP DATABASE Test;

The above query will drop the database with name Test from the system.

RENAME query
RENAME command is used to set a new name for any existing table. Following is the syntax,

RENAME old_table_name to new_table_name

Here is an example explaining it.

RENAME student to students_info;

The above query will rename the table student to students_info.

Using INSERT SQL command

Data Manipulation Language (DML) statements are used for managing data in database. DML commands are not auto-committed. It means changes
made by DML command are not permanent to database, it can be rolled back.
Talking about the Insert command, whenever we post a Tweet on Twitter, the text is stored in some table, and as we post a new tweet, a new record
gets inserted in that table.

INSERT command
Insert command is used to insert data into a table. Following is its general syntax,

INSERT INTO table_name VALUES(data1, data2, ...)

Lets see an example,
Consider a table student with the following fields.

s_id name age

INSERT INTO student VALUES(101, 'Adam', 15);

The above command will insert a new record into student table.

s_id name age

101 Adam 15
Insert value into only specific columns
We can use the INSERT command to insert values for only some specific columns of a row. We can specify the column names along with the values to
be inserted like this,

INSERT INTO student(id, name) values(102, 'Alex');

The above SQL query will only insert id and name values in the newly inserted record.

Insert NULL value to a column

Both the statements below will insert NULL value into age column of the student table.

INSERT INTO student(id, name) values(102, 'Alex');

Or,

INSERT INTO Student VALUES(102,'Alex', null);

The above command will insert only two column values and the other column is set to null.

S_id S_Name age

101 Adam 15

102 Alex

Insert Default value to a column

INSERT INTO Student VALUES(103,'Chris', default)

S_id S_Name age

101 Adam 15

102 Alex

103 chris 14

Suppose the column age in our tabel has a default value of 14.
Also, if you run the below query, it will insert default value into the age column, whatever the default value may be.

INSERT INTO Student VALUES(103,'Chris')

Using UPDATE SQL command

Let's take an example of a real-world problem. These days, Facebook provides an option for Editing your status update, how do you think it works?
Yes, using the Update SQL command.
Let's learn about the syntax and usage of the UPDATE command.
UPDATE command
UPDATE command is used to update any record of data in a table. Following is its general syntax,

UPDATE table_name SET column_name = new_value WHERE some_condition;

WHERE is used to add a condition to any SQL query, we will soon study about it in detail.

Lets take a sample table student,

student_id name age

101 Adam 15

102 Alex

103 chris 14

UPDATE student SET age=18 WHERE student_id=102;

S_id S_Name age

101 Adam 15

102 Alex 18

103 chris 14

In the above statement, if we do not use the WHERE clause, then our update query will update age for all the columns of the table to 18.

Updating Multiple Columns

We can also update values of multiple columns using a single UPDATE statement.

UPDATE student SET name='Abhi', age=17 where s_id=103;

The above command will update two columns of the record which has s_id 103.

s_id name age

101 Adam 15

102 Alex 18

103 Abhi 17
UPDATE Command: Incrementing Integer Value
When we have to update any integer value in a table, then we can fetch and update the value in the table in a single statement.
For example, if we have to update the age column of student table every year for every student, then we can simply run the following UPDATE statement
to perform the following operation:

UPDATE student SET age = age+1;

As you can see, we have used age = age + 1 to increment the value of age by 1.
NOTE: This style only works for integer values.

Using DELETE SQL command

When you ask any question in Studytonight's Forum it gets saved into a table. And using the Delete option, you can even delete a question asked by
you. How do you think that works? Yes, using the Delete DML command.
Let's study about the syntax and the usage of the Delete command.

DELETE command
DELETE command is used to delete data from a table.
Following is its general syntax,

DELETE FROM table_name;

Let's take a sample table student:

s_id name age

101 Adam 15

102 Alex 18

103 Abhi 17

Delete all Records from a Table

DELETE FROM student;
The above command will delete all the records from the table student.

Delete a particular Record from a Table

In our student table if we want to delete a single record, we can use the WHERE clause to provide a condition in our DELETE statement.

DELETE FROM student WHERE s_id=103;

The above command will delete the record where s_id is 103 from the table student.

S_id S_Name age

101 Adam 15
 102 Alex 18

Isn't DELETE same as TRUNCATE

TRUNCATE command is different from DELETE command. The delete command will delete all the rows from a table whereas truncate command not only
deletes all the records stored in the table, but it also re-initializes the table(like a newly created table).
For eg: If you have a table with 10 rows and an auto_increment primary key, and if you use DELETE command to delete all the rows, it will delete all the
rows, but will not re-initialize the primary key, hence if you will insert any row after using the DELETE command, the auto_increment primary key will start
from 11. But in case of TRUNCATE command, primary key is re-initialized, and it will again start from 1.

Commit, Rollback and Savepoint SQL commands

Transaction Control Language(TCL) commands are used to manage transactions in the database. These are used
to manage the changes made to the data in a table by DML statements. It also allows statements to be grouped
together into logical transactions.

COMMIT command
command is used to permanently save any transaction into the database.
COMMIT
When we use any DML command like INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE, the changes made by these commands are not
permanent, until the current session is closed, the changes made by these commands can be rolled back.
To avoid that, we use the COMMIT command to mark the changes as permanent.
Following is commit command's syntax,
COMMIT;

ROLLBACK command
This command restores the database to last commited state. It is also used with SAVEPOINT command to jump to a
savepoint in an ongoing transaction.
If we have used the UPDATE command to make some changes into the database, and realise that those changes
were not required, then we can use the ROLLBACK command to rollback those changes, if they were not commited
using the COMMIT command.
Following is rollback command's syntax,
ROLLBACK TO savepoint_name;

SAVEPOINT command
command is used to temporarily save a transaction so that you can rollback to that point whenever
SAVEPOINT
required.
Following is savepoint command's syntax,
SAVEPOINT savepoint_name;

In short, using this command we can name the different states of our data in any table and then rollback to that
state using the ROLLBACK command whenever required.

Using Savepoint and Rollback

Following is the table class,

id name

1 Abhi

2 Adam

4 Alex

Lets use some SQL queries on the above table and see the results.
INSERT INTO class VALUES(5, 'Rahul');

COMMIT;

UPDATE class SET name = 'Abhijit' WHERE id = '5';

SAVEPOINT A;

INSERT INTO class VALUES(6, 'Chris');

SAVEPOINT B;

INSERT INTO class VALUES(7, 'Bravo');

SAVEPOINT C;

SELECT * FROM class;

NOTE: SELECT statement is used to show the data stored in the table.

The resultant table will look like,

id name
1 Abhi

2 Adam

4 Alex

5 Abhijit

6 Chris

7 Bravo

Now let's use the ROLLBACK command to roll back the state of data to the savepoint B.
ROLLBACK TO B;

SELECT * FROM class;

Now our class table will look like,

id name

1 Abhi

2 Adam

4 Alex

5 Abhijit

6 Chris

Now let's again use the ROLLBACK command to roll back the state of data to the savepoint A
ROLLBACK TO A;

SELECT * FROM class;

Now the table will look like,

id name
 1 Abhi

2 Adam

4 Alex

5 Abhijit

So now you know how the commands COMMIT, ROLLBACK and SAVEPOINT works.

Using GRANT and REVOKE

Data Control Language(DCL) is used to control privileges in Database. To perform any operation in the database, such as for creating tables, sequences
or views, a user needs privileges. Privileges are of two types,

 System: This includes permissions for creating session, table, etc and all types of other system privileges.
 Object: This includes permissions for any command or query to perform any operation on the database tables.

In DCL we have two commands,

 GRANT: Used to provide any user access privileges or other priviliges for the database.

 REVOKE: Used to take back permissions from any user.

Allow a User to create session

When we create a user in SQL, it is not even allowed to login and create a session until and unless proper permissions/priviliges are granted to the user.
Following command can be used to grant the session creating priviliges.

GRANT CREATE SESSION TO username;

Allow a User to create table

To allow a user to create tables in the database, we can use the below command,

GRANT CREATE TABLE TO username;

Provide user with space on tablespace to store table

Allowing a user to create table is not enough to start storing data in that table. We also must provide the user with priviliges to use the available
tablespace for their table and data.

ALTER USER username QUOTA UNLIMITED ON SYSTEM;

The above command will alter the user details and will provide it access to unlimited tablespace on system.
NOTE: Generally unlimited quota is provided to Admin users.

Grant all privilege to a User

sysdba is a set of priviliges which has all the permissions in it. So if we want to provide all the privileges to any user, we can simply grant them
the sysdba permission.

GRANT sysdba TO username

Grant permission to create any table

Sometimes user is restricted from creating some tables with names which are reserved for system tables. But we can grant privileges to a user to create
any table using the below command,

GRANT CREATE ANY TABLE TO username

Grant permission to drop any table

As the title suggests, if you want to allow user to drop any table from the database, then grant this privilege to the user,

GRANT DROP ANY TABLE TO username

To take back Permissions

And, if you want to take back the privileges from any user, use the REVOKE command.

REVOKE CREATE TABLE FROM username

Using the WHERE SQL clause

WHERE clause is used to specify/apply any condition while retrieving, updating or deleting data from a table. This clause is used mostly
with SELECT, UPDATE and DELETEquery.
When we specify a condition using the WHERE clause then the query executes only for those records for which the condition specified by the WHERE clause
is true.

Syntax for WHERE clause

Here is how you can use the WHERE clause with a DELETE statement, or any other statement,

DELETE FROM table_name WHERE [condition];

The WHERE clause is used at the end of any SQL query, to specify a condition for execution.

Time for an Example

Consider a table student,

s_id name age address

 101 Adam 15 Chennai

102 Alex 18 Delhi

103 Abhi 17 Banglore

104 Ankit 22 Mumbai

Now we will use the SELECT statement to display data of the table, based on a condition, which we will add to our SELECT query using WHERE clause.
Let's write a simple SQL query to display the record for student with s_id as 101.

SELECT s_id,
name,
age,
address
FROM student WHERE s_id = 101;
Following will be the result of the above query.

s_id name age address

101 Adam 15 Noida

Applying condition on Text Fields

In the above example we have applied a condition to an integer value field, but what if we want to apply the condition on name field. In that case we must
enclose the value in single quote ' '. Some databases even accept double quotes, but single quotes is accepted by all.

SELECT s_id,
name,
age,
address
FROM student WHERE name = 'Adam';
Following will be the result of the above query.

s_id name age address

101 Adam 15 Noida

Operators for WHERE clause condition

Following is a list of operators that can be used while specifying the WHERE clause condition.

Operator Description
 = Equal to

!= Not Equal to

< Less than

> Greater than

<= Less than or Equal to

>= Greate than or Equal to

BETWEEN Between a specified range of values

LIKE This is used to search for a pattern in value.

IN In a given set of values

SQL LIKE clause

LIKE clause is used in the condition in SQL query with the WHERE clause. LIKE clause compares data with an expression using wildcard operators to
match pattern given in the condition.

Wildcard operators
There are two wildcard operators that are used in LIKE clause.

 Percent sign %: represents zero, one or more than one character.

 Underscore sign _: represents only a single character.

Example of LIKE clause

Consider the following Student table.

s_id s_Name age

101 Adam 15

102 Alex 18

103 Abhi 17
SELECT * FROM Student WHERE s_name LIKE 'A%';
The above query will return all records where s_name starts with character 'A'.

s_id s_Name age

101 Adam 15

102 Alex 18

103 Abhi 17

Using _ and %
SELECT * FROM Student WHERE s_name LIKE '_d%';
The above query will return all records from Student table where s_name contain 'd' as second character.

s_id s_Name age

101 Adam 15

Using % only
SELECT * FROM Student WHERE s_name LIKE '%x';
The above query will return all records from Student table where s_name contain 'x' as last character.

s_id s_Name age

102 Alex 18

SQL ORDER BY Clause

Order by clause is used with SELECT statement for arranging retrieved data in sorted order. The Order
by clause by default sorts the retrieved data in ascending order. To sort the data in descending
order DESC keyword is used with Order by clause.

Syntax of Order By
SELECT column-list|* FROM table-name ORDER BY ASC | DESC;
Using default Order by
Consider the following Emp table,

eid name age salary

401 Anu 22 9000

402 Shane 29 8000

403 Rohan 34 6000

404 Scott 44 10000

405 Tiger 35 8000

SELECT * FROM Emp ORDER BY salary;

The above query will return the resultant data in ascending order of the salary.

eid name age salary

403 Rohan 34 6000

402 Shane 29 8000

405 Tiger 35 8000

401 Anu 22 9000

404 Scott 44 10000

Using Order by DESC

Consider the Emp table described above,

SELECT * FROM Emp ORDER BY salary DESC;

The above query will return the resultant data in descending order of the salary.

eid name age salary

404 Scott 44 10000

 401 Anu 22 9000

405 Tiger 35 8000

402 Shane 29 8000

403 Rohan 34 6000

SQL Group By Clause

Group by clause is used to group the results of a SELECT query based on one or more columns. It is also used
with SQL functions to group the result from one or more tables.
Syntax for using Group by in a statement.

SELECT column_name, function(column_name)

FROM table_name
WHERE condition
GROUP BY column_name

Example of Group by in a Statement

Consider the following Emp table.

eid name age salary

401 Anu 22 9000

402 Shane 29 8000

403 Rohan 34 6000

404 Scott 44 9000

405 Tiger 35 8000

Here we want to find name and age of employees grouped by their salaries or in other words, we will be grouping employees based on their salaries,
hence, as a result, we will get a data set, with unique salaries listed, along side the first employee's name and age to have that salary. Hope you are
getting the point here!
group by is used to group different row of data together based on any one column.
SQL query for the above requirement will be,

SELECT name, age

FROM Emp GROUP BY salary
Result will be,

name age

Rohan 34

Shane 29

Anu 22

Example of Group by in a Statement with WHERE clause

Consider the following Emp table

eid name age salary

401 Anu 22 9000

402 Shane 29 8000

403 Rohan 34 6000

404 Scott 44 9000

405 Tiger 35 8000

SQL query will be,

SELECT name, salary

FROM Emp
WHERE age > 25
GROUP BY salary
Result will be.

name salary

Rohan 6000

Shane 8000

Scott 9000

You must remember that Group By clause will always come at the end of the SQL query, just like the Order by clause.
SQL HAVING Clause
Having clause is used with SQL Queries to give more precise condition for a statement. It is used to mention condition in Group by based SQL queries,
just like WHERE clause is used with SELECT query.
Syntax for HAVING clause is,

SELECT column_name, function(column_name)

FROM table_name
WHERE column_name condition
GROUP BY column_name
HAVING function(column_name) condition

Example of SQL Statement using HAVING

Consider the following Sale table.

oid order_name previous_balance customer

11 ord1 2000 Alex

12 ord2 1000 Adam

13 ord3 2000 Abhi

14 ord4 1000 Adam

15 ord5 2000 Alex

Suppose we want to find the customer whose previous_balance sum is more than 3000.
We will use the below SQL query,

SELECT *
FROM sale GROUP BY customer
HAVING sum(previous_balance) > 3000
Result will be,

oid order_name previous_balance customer

11 ord1 2000 Alex

The main objective of the above SQL query was to find out the name of the customer who has had a previous_balance more than 3000, based on all
the previous sales made to the customer, hence we get the first row in the table for customer Alex.

DISTINCT keyword
The distinct keyword is used with SELECT statement to retrieve unique values from the table. Distinct removes all the duplicate records while
retrieving records from any table in the database.
Syntax for DISTINCT Keyword
SELECT DISTINCT column-name FROM table-name;

Example using DISTINCT Keyword

Consider the following Emp table. As you can see in the table below, there is employee name, along with employee salary and age.
In the table below, multiple employees have the same salary, so we will be using DISTINCT keyword to list down distinct salary amount, that is currently
being paid to the employees.

eid name age salary

401 Anu 22 5000

402 Shane 29 8000

403 Rohan 34 10000

404 Scott 44 10000

405 Tiger 35 8000

SELECT DISTINCT salary FROM Emp;

The above query will return only the unique salary from Emp table.

salary

5000

8000

10000

SQL AND & OR operator

The AND and OR operators are used with the WHERE clause to make more precise conditions for fetching data from database by combining more than one
condition together.

AND operator
AND operator is used to set multiple conditions with the WHERE clause, alongside, SELECT, UPDATE or DELETE SQL queries.
Example of AND operator
Consider the following Emp table

eid name age salary

401 Anu 22 5000

402 Shane 29 8000

403 Rohan 34 12000

404 Scott 44 10000

405 Tiger 35 9000

SELECT * FROM Emp WHERE salary < 10000 AND age > 25
The above query will return records where salary is less than 10000 and age greater than 25. Hope you get the concept here. We have used
the AND operator to specify two conditions with WHERE clause.

eid name age salary

402 Shane 29 8000

405 Tiger 35 9000

OR operator
OR operator is also used to combine multiple conditions with WHERE clause. The only difference between AND and OR is their behaviour.
When we use AND to combine two or more than two conditions, records satisfying all the specified conditions will be there in the result.
But in case of OR operator, atleast one condition from the conditions specified must be satisfied by any record to be in the resultset.

Example of OR operator
Consider the following Emp table

eid name age salary

401 Anu 22 5000

402 Shane 29 8000

403 Rohan 34 12000

 404 Scott 44 10000

405 Tiger 35 9000

SELECT * FROM Emp WHERE salary > 10000 OR age > 25

The above query will return records where either salary is greater than 10000 or age is greater than 25.

402 Shane 29 8000

403 Rohan 34 12000

404 Scott 44 10000

405 Tiger 35 9000

Division Operator in SQL

The division operator is used when we have to evaluate queries which contain the keyword ALL.
Some instances where division operator is used are:

1. Which person has account in all the banks of a particular city?

2. Which students have taken all the courses required to graduate?

In above specified problem statements, the description after the keyword 'all' defines a set which contains some
elements and the final result contains those units which satisfy these requirements.
Another way how you can identify the usage of division operator is by using the logical implication of if...then.
In context of the above two examples, we can see that the queries mean that,

1. If there is a bank in that particular city, that person must have an account in that bank.
2. If there is a course in the list of courses required to be graduated, that person must have taken that course.

Do not worry if you are not clear with all this new things right away, we will try to expain as we move on with
this tutorial.
We shall see the second example, mentioned above, in detail.
Table 1: Course_Taken → It consists of the names of Students against the courses that they have taken.

Student_Name Course

Robert Databases

Robert Programming Languages

David Databases

David Operating Systems

Hannah Programming Languages

Hannah Machine Learning

Tom Operating Systems

Table 2: Course_Required → It consists of the courses that one is required to take in order to graduate.

Course

Databases

Programming Languages

Using Division Operator

So now, let's try to find out the correct SQL query for getting results for the first requirement, which is:
Query: Find all the students who can graduate. (i.e. who have taken all the subjects required for one to graduate.)

Unfortunately, there is no direct way by which we can express the division operator. Let's walk through the
steps, to write the query for the division operator.

1. Find all the students

Create a set of all students that have taken courses. This can be done easily using the following command.
CREATE TABLE AllStudents AS SELECT DISTINCT Student_Name FROM Course_Taken

This command will return the table AllStudents, as the resultset:

Student_name

Robert
David

Hannah

Tom

2. Find all the students and the courses required to graduate

Next, we will create a set of students and the courses they need to graduate. We can express this in the form of
Cartesian Product of AllStudents and Course_Required using the following command.
CREATE table StudentsAndRequired AS
SELECT AllStudents.Student_Name, Course_Required.Course
FROM AllStudents, Course_Required

Now the new resultset - table StudentsAndRequired will be:

Student_Name Course

Robert Databases

Robert Programming Languages

David Databases

David Programming Languages

Hannah Databases

Hannah Programming Languages

Tom Databases

Tom Programming Languages

3. Find all the students and the required courses they have not taken

Here, we are taking our first step for finding the students who cannot graduate. The idea is to simply find the
students who have not taken certain courses that are required for graduation and hence they wont be able to
graduate. This is simply all those tuples/rows which are present in StudentsAndRequired and not present
in Course_Taken.
CREATE table StudentsAndNotTaken AS
SELECT * FROM StudentsAndRequired WHERE NOT EXISTS
(Select * FROM Course_Taken WHERE StudentsAndRequired.Student_Name =
Course_Taken.Student_Name
AND StudentsAndRequired.Course = Course_Taken.Course)

The table StudentsAndNotTaken comes out to be:

Student_Name Course

David Programming Languages

Hannah Databases

Tom Databases

Tom Programming Languages

4. Find all students who cannot graduate

All the students who are present in the table StudentsAndNotTaken are the ones who cannot graduate.
Therefore, we can find the students who cannot graduate as,
CREATE table CannotGraduate AS SELECT DISTINCT Student_Name FROM StudentsAndNotTaken

Student_name

David

Hannah

Tom
5. Find all students who can graduate

The students who can graduate are simply those who are present in AllStudents but not in CannotGraduate.
This can be done by the following query:
CREATE Table CanGraduate AS SELECT * FROM AllStudents
WHERE NOT EXISTS
(SELECT * FROM CannotGraduate WHERE
CannotGraduate.Student_name = AllStudents.Student_name)

The results will be as follows:

Student_name

Robert

Hence we just learned, how different steps can lead us to the final answer. Now let us see how to write all these
5 steps in one single query so that we do not have to create so many tables.
SELECT DISTINCT x.Student_Name FROM Course_Taken AS x WHERE NOT
EXISTS(SELECT * FROM Course_Required AS y WHERE NOT
EXISTS(SELECT * FROM Course_Taken AS z
WHERE z.Student_name = x.Student_name
AND z.Course = y.Course ))

Student_name

Robert

This gives us the same result just like the 5 steps above.

SQL Constraints
SQL Constraints are rules used to limit the type of data that can go into a table, to maintain the accuracy and
integrity of the data inside table.
Constraints can be divided into the following two types,

1. Column level constraints: Limits only column data.

2. Table level constraints: Limits whole table data.
Constraints are used to make sure that the integrity of data is maintained in the database. Following are the most
used constraints that can be applied to a table.

 NOT NULL
 UNIQUE
 PRIMARY KEY
 FOREIGN KEY
 CHECK
 DEFAULT

NOT NULL Constraint

NOT NULL constraint restricts a column from having a NULL value. Once NOT NULL constraint is applied to a
column, you cannot pass a null value to that column. It enforces a column to contain a proper value.
One important point to note about this constraint is that it cannot be defined at table level.

Example using NOT NULL constraint

CREATE TABLE Student(s_id int NOT NULL, Name varchar(60), Age int);

The above query will declare that the s_id field of Student table will not take NULL value.

UNIQUE Constraint
UNIQUE constraint ensures that a field or column will only have unique values. A UNIQUE constraint field
will not have duplicate data. This constraint can be applied at column level or table level.

Using UNIQUE constraint when creating a Table (Table Level)

Here we have a simple CREATE query to create a table, which will have a column s_id with unique values.
CREATE TABLE Student(s_id int NOT NULL UNIQUE, Name varchar(60), Age int);

The above query will declare that the s_id field of Student table will only have unique values and wont take
NULL value.

Using UNIQUE constraint after Table is created (Column Level)

ALTER TABLE Student ADD UNIQUE(s_id);

The above query specifies that s_id field of Student table will only have unique value.

Primary Key Constraint

Primary key constraint uniquely identifies each record in a database. A Primary Key must contain unique value
and it must not contain null value. Usually Primary Key is used to index the data inside the table.

Using PRIMARY KEY constraint at Table Level

CREATE table Student (s_id int PRIMARY KEY, Name varchar(60) NOT NULL, Age int);

The above command will creates a PRIMARY KEY on the s_id.

Using PRIMARY KEY constraint at Column Level

ALTER table Student ADD PRIMARY KEY (s_id);

The above command will creates a PRIMARY KEY on the s_id.

Foreign Key Constraint

FOREIGN KEY is used to relate two tables. FOREIGN KEY constraint is also used to restrict actions that
would destroy links between tables. To understand FOREIGN KEY, let's see its use, with help of the below
tables:
Customer_Detail Table

c_id Customer_Name address

101 Adam Noida

102 Alex Delhi

103 Stuart Rohtak

Order_Detail Table

Order_id Order_Name c_id

10 Order1 101

11 Order2 103

12 Order3 102

In Customer_Detail table, c_id is the primary key which is set as foreign key in Order_Detail table. The value
that is entered in c_id which is set as foreign key in Order_Detail table must be present
in Customer_Detail table where it is set as primary key. This prevents invalid data to be inserted
into c_id column of Order_Detail table.
If you try to insert any incorrect data, DBMS will return error and will not allow you to insert the data.

Using FOREIGN KEY constraint at Table Level

CREATE table Order_Detail(
order_id int PRIMARY KEY,
order_name varchar(60) NOT NULL,
c_id int FOREIGN KEY REFERENCES Customer_Detail(c_id)
);

In this query, c_id in table Order_Detail is made as foriegn key, which is a reference of c_id column in
Customer_Detail table.

Using FOREIGN KEY constraint at Column Level

ALTER table Order_Detail ADD FOREIGN KEY (c_id) REFERENCES Customer_Detail(c_id);

Behaviour of Foriegn Key Column on Delete

There are two ways to maintin the integrity of data in Child table, when a particular record is deleted in the
main table. When two tables are connected with Foriegn key, and certain data in the main table is deleted, for
which a record exits in the child table, then we must have some mechanism to save the integrity of data in the
child table.

1. On Delete Cascade : This will remove the record from child table, if that value of foriegn key is deleted from the
main table.
2. On Delete Null : This will set all the values in that record of child table as NULL, for which the value of foriegn
key is deleted from the main table.
3. If we don't use any of the above, then we cannot delete data from the main table for which data in child table
exists. We will get an error if we try to do so.
 ERROR : Record in child table exist

CHECK Constraint
CHECK constraint is used to restrict the value of a column between a range. It performs check on the values,
before storing them into the database. Its like condition checking before saving data into a column.

Using CHECK constraint at Table Level

CREATE table Student(
s_id int NOT NULL CHECK(s_id > 0),
Name varchar(60) NOT NULL,
Age int
);

The above query will restrict the s_id value to be greater than zero.

Using CHECK constraint at Column Level

ALTER table Student ADD CHECK(s_id > 0);

What are SQL Functions?

SQL provides many built-in functions to perform operations on data. These functions are useful while
performing mathematical calculations, string concatenations, sub-strings etc. SQL functions are divided into
two categories,

1. Aggregate Functions
2. Scalar Functions

Aggregate Functions
These functions return a single value after performing calculations on a group of values. Following are some
of the frequently used Aggregrate functions.

AVG() Function

Average returns average value after calculating it from values in a numeric column.
Its general syntax is,
SELECT AVG(column_name) FROM table_name
Using AVG() function
Consider the following Emp table

eid name age salary

401 Anu 22 9000

402 Shane 29 8000

403 Rohan 34 6000

404 Scott 44 10000

405 Tiger 35 8000

SQL query to find average salary will be,

SELECT avg(salary) from Emp;

Result of the above query will be,

avg(salary)

8200

COUNT() Function

Count returns the number of rows present in the table either based on some condition or without condition.
Its general syntax is,
SELECT COUNT(column_name) FROM table-name

Using COUNT() function

Consider the following Emp table

eid name age salary

401 Anu 22 9000

402 Shane 29 8000

403 Rohan 34 6000

404 Scott 44 10000

405 Tiger 35 8000

SQL query to count employees, satisfying specified condition is,

SELECT COUNT(name) FROM Emp WHERE salary = 8000;

Result of the above query will be,

count(name)

Example of COUNT(distinct)
Consider the following Emp table

eid name age salary

401 Anu 22 9000

402 Shane 29 8000

403 Rohan 34 6000

404 Scott 44 10000

405 Tiger 35 8000

SQL query is,

SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT salary) FROM emp;

Result of the above query will be,

count(distinct salary)
4

FIRST() Function

First function returns first value of a selected column

Syntax for FIRST function is,
SELECT FIRST(column_name) FROM table-name;

Using FIRST() function

Consider the following Emp table

eid name age salary

401 Anu 22 9000

402 Shane 29 8000

403 Rohan 34 6000

404 Scott 44 10000

405 Tiger 35 8000

SQL query will be,

SELECT FIRST(salary) FROM Emp;

and the result will be,

first(salary)

9000

LAST() Function

LAST function returns the return last value of the selected column.
Syntax of LAST function is,
SELECT LAST(column_name) FROM table-name;
Using LAST() function
Consider the following Emp table

eid name age salary

401 Anu 22 9000

402 Shane 29 8000

403 Rohan 34 6000

404 Scott 44 10000

405 Tiger 35 8000

SQL query will be,

SELECT LAST(salary) FROM emp;

Result of the above query will be,

last(salary)

8000

MAX() Function

MAX function returns maximum value from selected column of the table.
Syntax of MAX function is,
SELECT MAX(column_name) from table-name;

Using MAX() function

Consider the following Emp table

eid name age salary

401 Anu 22 9000

402 Shane 29 8000

403 Rohan 34 6000

404 Scott 44 10000

405 Tiger 35 8000

SQL query to find the Maximum salary will be,

SELECT MAX(salary) FROM emp;

Result of the above query will be,

MAX(salary)

10000

MIN() Function

MIN function returns minimum value from a selected column of the table.
Syntax for MIN function is,
SELECT MIN(column_name) from table-name;

Using MIN() function

Consider the following Emp table,

eid name age salary

401 Anu 22 9000

402 Shane 29 8000

403 Rohan 34 6000

404 Scott 44 10000

405 Tiger 35 8000

SQL query to find minimum salary is,
SELECT MIN(salary) FROM emp;

Result will be,

MIN(salary)

6000

SUM() Function
SUM function returns total sum of a selected columns numeric values.
Syntax for SUM is,
SELECT SUM(column_name) from table-name;

Using SUM() function

Consider the following Emp table

eid name age salary

401 Anu 22 9000

402 Shane 29 8000

403 Rohan 34 6000

404 Scott 44 10000

405 Tiger 35 8000

SQL query to find sum of salaries will be,

SELECT SUM(salary) FROM emp;

Result of above query is,

SUM(salary)
41000

Scalar Functions
Scalar functions return a single value from an input value. Following are some frequently used Scalar Functions
in SQL.

UCASE() Function

UCASE function is used to convert value of string column to Uppercase characters.

Syntax of UCASE,
SELECT UCASE(column_name) from table-name;

Using UCASE() function

Consider the following Emp table

eid name age salary

401 anu 22 9000

402 shane 29 8000

403 rohan 34 6000

404 scott 44 10000

405 Tiger 35 8000

SQL query for using UCASE is,

SELECT UCASE(name) FROM emp;

Result is,

UCASE(name)

ANU
SHANE

ROHAN

SCOTT

TIGER

LCASE() Function

LCASE function is used to convert value of string columns to Lowecase characters.

Syntax for LCASE is,
SELECT LCASE(column_name) FROM table-name;

Using LCASE() function

Consider the following Emp table

eid name age salary

401 Anu 22 9000

402 Shane 29 8000

403 Rohan 34 6000

404 SCOTT 44 10000

405 Tiger 35 8000

SQL query for converting string value to Lower case is,

SELECT LCASE(name) FROM emp;

Result will be,

LCASE(name)

anu
shane

rohan

scott

tiger

MID() Function

MID function is used to extract substrings from column values of string type in a table.
Syntax for MID function is,
SELECT MID(column_name, start, length) from table-name;

Using MID() function

Consider the following Emp table

eid name age salary

401 anu 22 9000

402 shane 29 8000

403 rohan 34 6000

404 scott 44 10000

405 Tiger 35 8000

SQL query will be,

SELECT MID(name,2,2) FROM emp;

Result will come out to be,

MID(name,2,2)
nu

ha

oh

co

ig

ROUND() Function

ROUND function is used to round a numeric field to number of nearest integer. It is used on Decimal point
values.
Syntax of Round function is,
SELECT ROUND(column_name, decimals) from table-name;

Using ROUND() function

Consider the following Emp table

eid name age salary

401 anu 22 9000.67

402 shane 29 8000.98

403 rohan 34 6000.45

404 scott 44 10000

405 Tiger 35 8000.01

SQL query is,

SELECT ROUND(salary) from emp;
Result will be,

ROUND(salary)

9001

8001

6000

10000

8000