EnterpriseDB SQL: A Primer Oracle Tips by Burleson Consulting

Introduction

This primer will give you a basic understanding of databases in general and database objects and the structured query language (SQL) in EnterpriseDB (and Oracle to a degree) in particular.  EnterpriseDB provides excellent documentation and there are many SQL books that contain very detailed information.  The goal of this chapter is not to make you a SQL expert.  This chapter's goal is to get you up and running with SQL without encumbering you with every possible command syntax you may or may not ever need.

I have read many technical books and have discussed most of those with friends and co-workers.  A common complaint with some technical database books is that they get bogged down in too detailed of a SQL discussion.  Of course, another common complaint is that they didn't get detailed enough.  I'm going to try to keep a fine balance here.  I need to cover everything required to get a newbie up and running (or I couldn't call this the definitive reference!) but I don't want this to become a general SQL or programming reference.

I settled on a primer.  I am going to start at a very basic level and steadily work my way up.  If you are a SQL guru, you can skip the entire chapter.  If you are just learning SQL, start at the beginning.  If you're in the middle somewhere, that might be a good place to start.

In this chapter, I am going to cover the basics of what a database is: tables, columns, views, etc.  I will show examples of these structures and of more conceptual items such as relations and keys.  From there, I will move on to SQL data types and end with Data Definition Language (DDL) and Data Manipulation Language (DML).  I will close the chapter by working through the library of SQL functions available by providing detailed examples.

By the time you finish this chapter you should understand what a database is and be comfortable using one.  You will be able to create many types of database objects and you will be able to generate SQL queries and manipulation statements.  The subject matter will be very specific to EnterpriseDB but most of the concepts are portable to any database.

This is an excerpt from the book "EnterpriseDB: The Definitive Reference" by Rampant TechPress.