Relational database management systems are vital to many organizations. People often think that creating and maintaining these systems must be extremely complex activities — the domain of database gurus who possess enlightenment beyond that of mere mortals. This book sweeps away the database mystique.
In this interactive course, you
♦ Get to the roots of databases.
♦ Find out how a DBMS is structured.
♦ Discover the major functional components of SQL.
♦ Build a database.
♦ Protect a database from harm.
♦ Operate on database data.
♦ Determine how to get the information you want out of a database.
The purpose of this course is to help you build relational databases and get valuable information out of them by using SQL. SQL is the international standard language used to create and maintain relational databases. This edition covers the latest version of the standard, SQL:2016.
This course doesn’t tell you how to design a database (See Database Development For Dummies, also published by Wiley). Here we assume that you or somebody else has already created a valid design. I then illustrate how you implement that design by using SQL. If you suspect that you don’t have a good database design, then by all means fix your design before you try to build the database. The earlier you detect and correct problems in a development project, the cheaper the corrections will be.
