Table of Contents About the book .... About the author Sponsors Ebook PDF Generation Tool . Book Cover ... oyuou License Databases ... Tables and columns .... MySQL .. Installing MySQL... Accessing MySQL via CLI . Creating a database Configuring .my.cnf The mysqladmin command . GUI clients Tables ....... Data types Creating a database Creating tables ... Dropping tables .... Allowing NULL values Specifying a primary key . Updating tables .....Basic Syntax INSERT SELECT UPDATE. ......0.00+ DELETE .. Comments Conclusion SELECT o..ctscccsoe SELECT all columns Formatting .... SELECT specific columns only... UMIT .. COUNT .... MIN, MAX, AVG, and SUM DISTINCT 1... Conclusion ... WHERE — WHERE Clause example ... Operators AND keyword OR keyword LIKE operator IN operator IS operator ConclusionSorting with ORDER and GROUP BY ORDER BY .. GROUP BY .. INSERT ... Inserting multiple records UPDATE ... . 73 DELETE JOIN .. Cross join ..... Inner join. Left join . Right join .. Conclusion .. . 87 The MySQL dump command ..... . 88 Exporting a Database .... Exporting all databases Automated backups . Conclusion Conclusion .... Other eBooksAbout the book + This version was published on May 18 2021 This is an open-source introduction to SQL guide that will help you learn the basics of SQL and start using relational databases for your SysOps, DevOps, and Dev projects. No matter if you are a DevOps/SysOps engineer, developer, or just a Linux enthusiast, you will most likely have to use SQL at some point in your career. The guide is suitable for anyone working as a developer, system administrator, or a DevOps engineer and wants to learn the basics of SQL.About the author My name is Bobby lliev, and | have been working as a Linux DevOps Engineer since 2014. | am an avid Linux lover and supporter of the open-source movement philosophy. | am always doing that which | cannot do in order that | may learn how to do it, and | believe in sharing knowledge. I think it's essential always to keep professional and surround yourself with good people, work hard, and be nice to everyone. You have to perform at a consistently higher level than others. That's the mark of a true professional. For more information, please visit my blog at https://bobbyiliev.com, follow me on Twitter @bobbyiliev_ and YouTube.Sponsors This book is made possible thanks to these fantastic companies! DigitalOcean DigitalOcean is a cloud services platform delivering the simplicity developers love and businesses trust to run production applications at scale. It provides highly available, secure, and scalable compute, storage, and networking solutions that help developers build great software faster. Founded in 2012 with offices in New York and Cambridge, MA, DigitalOcean offers transparent and affordable pricing, an elegant user interface, and one of the largest libraries of open source resources available. For more information, please visit https://www.digitalocean.com or follow @digitalocean on Twitter. If you are new to DigitalOcean, you can get a free $100 credit and spin up your own servers via this referral link here: Free $100 Credit For DigitalOcean DevDojo The DevDojo is a resource to learn all things web development and web design. Learn on your lunch break or wake up and enjoy a cup of coffee with us to learn something new. Join this developer community, and we can all learn together, build together, and grow together.join DevDojo For more information, please visit https://www.devdojo.com or follow @thedevdojo on Twitter.Ebook PDF Generation Tool This ebook was generated by Ibis developed by Mohamed Said. Ibis is a PHP tool that helps you write eBooks in markdown.Book Cover The cover for this ebook was created with Canva.com. If you ever need to create a graphic, poster, invitation, logo, presentation - or anything that looks good — give Canva a go. 10License MIT License Copyright (c) 2020 Bobby tliev Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. 1lDatabases Before we dive deep into SQL, let's quickly define what a database is. The definition of databases from Wikipedia is: A database is an organized collection of data, generally stored and accessed electronically from a computer system. In other words, a database is a collection of data stored and structured in different database tables. 12Tables and columns You've mostlikely worked with spreadsheet systems like Excel or Google Sheets. At the very basic, database tables are quite similar to spreadsheets, Each table has different columns which could contain different types of data, For example, if you have a todo list app, you would have a database, and in your database, you would have different tables storing different information like: + Users - In the users table, you would have some data for your users like: username, name, and active, for example. + Tasks - The tasks table would store all of the tasks that you are planning to do. The columns of the tasks table would be for example, task_name, status, due date and priority. The Users table will look like this: | id | username 11 | bobby | Bobby Tliev 12 | grisi | Greisi I. 13 | devdojo | Dev Dojo Rundown of the table structure: + We have 4 columns: id, username, name and active + We also have 3 entries/users + The id column is a unique identifier of each user and is auto- incremented. 13In the next chapter, we will learn how to install MySQL and create our first database. 14MySQL Now that you know what a database, table, and column are, the next thing that you would need to do is install a database service where you would be running your SQL queries on. We would be using MySQL as it is free, open-source, and very widely used. 15Installing MySQL As we are going to use Ubuntu, in order to install MySQL run the following commands: + First update your apt repository sudo apt update -y * Then install MySQL: sudp apt install mysql-server mysql-clien We are installing 2 packages, one is the actual MySQL server, and the other is the MySQL client, which would allow us to connect to the MySQL server and run our queries. In order to check if MySQL is running, run the following command: sudo systemctl status mysql.service In order to secure your MySQL server, you could run the following command: sudo mysql_secure_installation Then follow the prompt and finally choose a secure password and save it in a secure place like a password manager. With that, you would have MySQL installed on your Ubuntu server. The above should also work just fine on Debina. 16Install MySQL on Mac | would recommend installing MySQL using Homebrew brew install mysql After that start MySQL: brew services start mysql And finally, secure it: mysql_secure_installation In case that you ever need to stop the MySQL service, you could do so with the following command: brew services stop mysql Install MySQL on Windows In order to install MySQL on Windows, | would recommend following the steps from the official documentation here: Vv.) /refman/8.0/en/windows-installation.htm| 17Accessing MySQL via CLI To access MySQL run the mysql command followed by your user: mysql -u root -p 18Creating a database After that, switch to the demo database that we created in the previous chapter: USE demo; To exit the just type the following: exit; 19Configuring .ny.cnf By configuring the ~/.my..cnf file in your user's home directory, MySQL would allow you to login without prompting you for a password. In order to make that change, what you need to do is first create a -my..cnf file in your user's home directory: touch ~/.my.cnf After that, set secure permissions so that other regular users could not read the file: chmod 660 ~/.my.cnf Then using your favorite text editor, open the file: nano ~/.my.cnf And add the following configuration: [client] user=YOUR_MYSQL_USERNAME password=YOUR_MYSQL_PASSWORD Make sure to update your MySQL credentials accordingly, then save the file and exit. After that, if you run just mysql, you will be authenticated directly with the credentials that you've specified in the ~/.my. cnf file without being prompted for a password. 20The mysqladmin command ‘As a quick test, you could check all of your open SQL connections by running the following command: mysqladmin proc The mysqladmin tool would also use the client details from the ~/.my.cnf file, and it would list your current MySQL process list. Another cool thing that you could try doing is combining this with the watch command and kind of monitor your MySQL connections in almost real-time: watch -n1 mysqladmin proc To stop the watch command, just hit CTRL+C 21GUI clients Ifyou prefer using GUI clients, you could take a look a the following ones and install them locally on your laptop: + MySQL Workbench + Sequel Pro + TablePlus This will allow you to connect to your database via a graphical interface rather than the mysql command-line tool. 22Tables Before we get started with SQL, let's learn how to create tables and columns. As an example, we are going to create a users table with the following columns: + id - this is going to be the primary ID of the table and would be the unique identifier of each user. + username - this column would hold the username of our users + name - here, we will store the full name of the users + status - here, we will store the status of a user, which would indicate if a user is active or not. You need to specify the data type of each column. In our case it would be like this: + id - Intiger + username - Varchar + name - Varchar + status - Number 23Data types The most common data types that you would come across are + cHAR(size): Fixed-length character string with a maximum length of 255 bytes. + VARCHAR(size): Variable-length character string. Max size is specified in parenthesis. + TExT(size): A string with a maximum length of 65,535 bytes. * INTEGER(size) or INT(size): A medium integer. * BOOLEAN or BOOL: Holds a true or false value. * DATE: Holds a date. Let's have the following users table as an example: + id: We would want to set the ID to INT. + name: The name should fit in a VARCHAR column. + about: As the about section could be longer, we could set the column data type to TEXT. + birthday: For the birthday column of the user, we could use DATE. For more information on all data types available, make sure to check out the official documentation here. 24Creating a database As we briefly covered in the previous chapter, before you could create tables, you would need to create a database by running the following: + First access MySQL: mysql -u root -p + Then create a database called demo_db: CREATE DATABASE demo_db; Note: the database name needs to be unique, if you already have a database named demo_db you would receive an error that the database already exists. You can consider this database as the container where we would create all of the tables in. Once you've created the database, you need to switch to that database: USE demo_db; You can think of this as accessing a directory in Linux with the cd command. With USE, we switch to a specific database. Alternatively, if you do not want to ‘switch’ to the specific database, you would need to specify the so-called fully qualified table name. For example, if you had a users table in the demo_db, and you wanted to select all of the entries from that table, you could use one of the 2following two approaches: * Switch to the demo_db first and then run a select statement: USE demo_db; SELECT username FROM demo_db.users; + Alternatively, rather than using the USE command first, specify the database name followed by the table name separated with a dot: db_name, table_name: SELECT username FROM demo_db.users; We are going to cover the SELECT statement more in-depth in the following chapters. 26Creating tables In order to create a table, you need to use the CREATE TABLE statement followed by the columns that you want to have in that table and their data type. Let's say that we wanted to create a users table with the following columns: + id: An integer value + username: A varchar value + about: A text type * birthday: Date tue or false * active: The query that we would need to run to create that table would be: CREATE TABLE users ( id INT, username VARCHAR(255) , about TEXT, birthday DATE, active BOOL yi Note: You need to select a database first with the USE command as mentioned above. Otherwise you will get the following error: “ERROR 1046 (3D000): No database selected. To list the available tables, you could run the following command: SHOW TABLES; 27Output: oe oe | Tables_in_demo_db | 28Dropping tables You can drop or delete tables by using the DROP TABLE statement. Let's test that and drop the table that we've just created: DROP TABLE users; The output that you would get would be Query 0K, © rows affected (0.03 sec) And now, if you were to run the SHOW TABLES; query again, you would get the following output: Empty set (0.00 sec) 29Allowing NULL values By default, each column in your table can hold NULL values. In case that you don't wanted to allow NULL values for some of the columns in a specific table, you need to specify this during the table creation or later on change the table to allow that. For example, let's say that we want the username column to be a required one, we would need to alter the table create statement and include NOT NULL right next to the username column like this: CREATE TABLE users ( id INT, username VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL, about TEXT, birthday DATE, active BOOL % That way, when you try to add a new user, MySQL will let you know that the username column is required. 30Specifying a primary key The primary key column, which in our case is the id column, is a unique identifier for our users. We want the id column to be unique, and also, whenever we add new users, we want the ID of the user to autoincrement for each new user. This can be achieved with a primary key and AUTO_INCREMENT. The primary key column needs to be NOT NULL as well. If we were to alter the table creation statement, it would look like this: CREATE TABLE users ( id INT PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT, username VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL, about TEXT, birthday DATE, active BOOL yi 31Updating tables In the above example, we created a new table and then dropped it as it was empty. However, in a real-life scenario, this would really be the case. So whenever you need to add or remove a new column from a specific table, you would need to use the ALTER TABLE statement. Let's say that we wanted to add an email column with type varchar to our users table. The syntax would be: ALTER TABLE users ADD email VARCHAR(255) ; After that, if you were to describe the table, you would see the new column: DESCRIBE users; Output: + | Field — | Type | Null | Key | Default | + | id | int | NO | PRE | NULL | | username | varchar(255) | NO | | NULL | | about | text | YES | | NULL | | birthday | date | Yes | J NULL | | active | tinyint(1) | YES | | NULL | email | varchar(255) | YES | [NULL | 32If you wanted to drop a specific column, the syntax would be: ALTER TABLE table_name DROP COLUMN column_name; Note: keep in mind that this is a permanent change, and if you have any critical data in the specific column, it would be deleted instantly. You can use the ALTER TABLE statement to also change the data type of a specific column. For example, you could change the about column from TEXT to LONGTEXT type, which could hold longer strings. Note: Important thing to keep in mind is that if a specific table already holds a particular type of data value like an integer, you can't alter it to varchar, for example. Only if the column does not contain any values, then you could make the change. 33Basic Syntax In this chapter, we will go over the basic SQL syntax. SQL statements are basically the ‘commands’ that you run against a specific database. Through the SQL statements, you are telling MySQL what you want it to do, for example, if you wanted to get the username of all of your users stored in the users table, you would run the following SQL statement: SELECT username FROM users ; Rundown of the statement: * SELECT: First, we specify the SELECT keyword, which indicates that we want to select some data from the database. Other popular keywords are: INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE. * username: Then we specify which column we want to select * users: After that, we specify the table that we want to select the data from. + The ; is required. Every SQL statement needs to end with a semicolumn. Ifyou run the above statement, you will get no results as the new users table that we've just created is empty. As a good practice, all SQL keywords should be with uppercase, however, it would work just fine if you use lower case as well. Let's go ahead and cover the basic operations next, 34INSERT To add data to your database, you would use the INSERT statement. Let's use the table that we created in the last chapter and insert 1 user into our users table: INSERT INTO users(username, email, active) VALUES( ‘bobby’, ‘bobby@bobbyiliev.com', true); Rundown of the insert statement: * INSERT INTO users: first, we specify the INSERT INTO keyword, which tells MySQL that we want to insert data into the users table. ‘users (username, email, active): then, we specify the table name users and the columns that we want to insert data into. + VALUES: then, we specify the values that we want to insert in. 35SELECT Once we've inserted that user, let's go ahead and retrieve the information. To retrieve information from your database, you could use the SELECT statement: SELECT * FROM users; Output: | id | username | about | birthday | active | email | eee en | 1 | bobby my | NULL 1 | bobbyeb. ‘As we specify * right after the SELECT keyword, this means that we want to get all of the columns from the users table. If we wanted to the only the username and the email columns instead, we would change the statement to: SELECT username,email FROM users; This will return all of the users, but as of the time being we have only 1: 36| username | email | bobby | _bobby@bobbyiliev.com + ROR ER 37UPDATE In order to modify data in your database, you could use the UPDATE statement. The syntax would look like this: UPDATE users SET username='bobbyiliev' WHERE id=1; Rundown of the statement: * UPDATE users: first, we specify the UPDATE keyword followed by the table that we want to update * username="bobbyiliev' Then we specify the columns that we want to update and the new value that we want to set. + WHERE id=1: Finally, by using the WHERE clause, we specify which user should be updated. In our case it is the user with ID 1. NOTE: If we don't specify a WHERE clause, all of the entries inside the users table would be updated, and all users would have the username set to bobbyiliev. You need to be careful when you use the UPDATE statement without a WHERE clause, as every single row will be updated. We are going to cover WHERE more in-depth in the next few chapters. 38DELETE As the name suggests, the DELETE statement would remove data from your database. The syntax is as follows: DELETE FROM users WHERE id=1; Similar to the UPDATE statement, if you don't specify a WHERE clause, all of the entries from the table will be affected, meaning that all of your users will be deleted. 39Comments In case that you are writing a larger SQL script, it might be helpful to add some comments so that later on, when you come back to the script, you would know what each line does. As with all programming languages, you can add comments in SQL as well. There are two types of comments: + Inline comments: To do so, you just need to add -- before the text that you want to comment out: SELECT * FROM users; -- Get all users + Multiple-line comments Similar to some other programming languages in order to comment multiple lines, you could wrap the text in /* */ as follows: / Get all of the SELECT * FROM users; You could write that in . sql file and then run it later on, or execute the few lines directly. 40Conclusion Those were some of the most common basic SQL statements. In the next chapter, we are going to go over each of the above statements more in-depth. 41SELECT ‘As we briefly covered in the previous chapter, the SELECT statement allows us to retrieve data from a specific database. You can use SELECT to get all of your users or a list of users that match a certain criteria. Before we dive into the SELECT statement let's quickly create a database: CREATE DATABASE sql_demo; Switch to that database: USE sql_demo; Create a new users table: CREATE TABLE users ( id INT PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT, username VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL, about TEXT, email VARCHAR(255), birthday DATE, active BOOL vi Insert some data that we could work with: 42INSERT INTO users ( username, email, active ) VALUES (‘bobby', 'b@devdojo.com', true), (‘devdojo', ‘d@devdojo.com', false), (‘tony', 't@devdojo.com', true); Output: Query OK, 3 rows affected (0.08 sec) Records: 3 Duplicates: @ Warnings: 0 We are going to learn more about the INSERT statement in the following chapters. 43SELECT all columns Now that we've got some data in the users table, let's go ahead and retrieve all of the entries from that table: SELECT * FROM users; Rundown of the statement: * SELECT: first, we specify the action that we want to execute, in our case, we want to select or get some data from the database. + *: the star here indicates that we want to get all of the columns associated with the table that we are selecting from. * FROM: the from statement tells MySQL which table we want to select the data from. You need to keep in mind that you can select from multiple tables, but this is a bit more advanced, and we are going to cover this in the next few chapters + users: this is the table name that we want to select the data from. This will return all of the entries in the users table along with all of the columns: | id | username | about | birthday | active | email | + =: - -- + J NULL | NULL I 1 | b@devdojo.com | | 1 | bobby | 2 | devdojo | NULL | NULL I © | d@devdojo.com | | 3 | tony J NULL | NULL I 1 | t@devdojo.com | frceeteneeee - - + 3 rows in set (0.00 sec) As you can see, we get a list of the 3 users that we've just created, including all of the columns in that table. In some cases, the table might have a lot of columns, and you might not want to see alll of them. For 44example, we have the about and birthday columns that are all NULL at the moment. So let's see how we could limit that and get only a list of specific columns. 45Formatting ‘As we mentioned in the previous chapters, each SQL statement needs to end with a semi column: ;. Alternatively, rather than using a semi column, you could use the \G characters which would format the output. ina list rather than a table. The syntax is absolutely the same but you just change the ; with \G: SELECT * FROM users \G The output will be formatted like this: ZHOCE ORDER OR EOEEDOHO 1, poy PORES O RHODE DO AOR OE aE: id: 1 bobby NULL NULL active: 1 email: b@devdojo.com SSSEE SOE HOE EERE BOEEOEE DEES 2 poy HEEHSuHOBBOE EDO BOBEOEEEEEE 2 devdojo NULL NULL 8 d@devdojo.com This is very handy whenever your table consists of a large number of columns and they can't fit on the screen, which makes it very hard to read the result set. 46SELECT specific columns only You could limit this to a specific set of columns. Let's say that you only needed the username and the active columns. In this case, you would change the * symbol with the columns that you want to select divided by a comma: SELECT username, active FROM users; Output: ee eet | username | active | teeeeeeee tebe eee necot | bobby | 11 | devdojo | o| | tony I 1| Secor + ‘As you can see, we are getting back only the 2 columns that we've specified in the SELECT statement. 47LIMIT The LIMIT clause is very handy in case that you want to limit the number of results that you get back. For example, at the moment, we have 3 users in our database, but let's say that you only wanted to get 1 entry back when you run the SELECT statement. This can be achieved by adding the LIMIT clause at the end of your statement, followed by the number of entries that you want to get. For example, let's say that we wanted to get only 1 entry back. We would run the following query: SELECT * FROM users LIMIT 1; Output: | id | username | about | birthday | active | email | | 2 | bobby + al J NULL | NULL I 1 | b@devdojo.com | a a + If you wanted to get 2 entries, you would change LIMIT 2 and so on. 48COUNT In case that you wanted to get only the number of entries in a specific column, you could use the COUNT function. This is a function that | personally use very often. The syntax is the following: SELECT COUNT(*) FROM users; Output: | COUNT(*) | + 49MIN, MAX, AVG, and SUM Another useful set of functions similar to COUNT that would make your. life easier are: + MIN: this would give you the smallest value of a specific column. For example, if you had an online shop and you wanted to get the lowest price, you would use the MIN function. In our case, if we wanted to get the lowest user ID, we would run the following: SELECT MIN(id) FROM users; This would return 1 as the lowest user ID that we have is 1. + MAX: just like MIN, but it would return the highest value: SELECT MAX(id) FROM users; In our case, this would be 3 as we have only 3 users, and the highest value of the id column is 3. * AVG: as the name suggest, it would sum up all of the values of a specific column and return the average value. As we have 3 users with ids 1, 2, and 3, which is 6 divided by 3 users is 2. SELECT AVG(id) FROM users; + uM: this function takes all of the values from the specified column and sums them up: 50SELECT SUM(id) FROM users; 51DISTINCT In some cases, you might have duplicate entries in a table, and in order to get only the unique values, you could use DISTINCT. To better demonstrate this, let's run the insert statement one more time so that we could duplicate the existing users and have 6 users in the users table: INSERT INTO users ( username, email, active ) VALUES (‘bobby', "b@devdojo.com', true), (‘devdojo', ‘d@devdojo.com', false), (‘tony', 't@devdojo.com', true); Now, if you run SELECT COUNT(*) FROM users; you would get 6 back. Let's also select all users and show only the username column: SELECT username FROM users; Output: | username | teens | bobby | | devdojo | tony | bobby | devdojo | | | | | tony | + 52As you can see, each name is present multiple times in the list. We have 2 times bobby, 2 times devdjo and 2 times tony. If we wanted to only show the unique usernames, we could add the DISTINCT keyword to our select statement: SELECT DISTINCT username FROM users; Output: foese | username | teeeeeeceeot + | bobby | | devdojo | | tony | As you can see, the duplicate entries have been removed from the output, 53Conclusion The SELECT statement is essential whenever working with SQL. In the next chapter, we are going to learn how to use the WHERE clause and take the SELECT statements to the next level. 54WHERE The WHERE clause allows you to specify different conditions so that you could filter out the data and get a specific result set. You would add the WHERE clause after the FROM clause. The syntax would look like this: SELECT column_name FROM table_name WHERE column=some_value; 55WHERE Clause example If we take the example users table from the last chapter, let's say that we wanted to get only the active users. The SQL statement would look like this: SELECT DISTINCT username,email,active FROM users WHERE active=true; Output: + | username | email | active | + + | bobby — | b@devdojo.com | 1| | tony | t@devdojo.com | 1] + + As you can see, we are only getting tony and bobby back as their active column is true or 1. If we wanted to get the inactive users, we would have to change the WHERE clause and set the active to false: os | username | email | active | en | devdojo | dedevdojo.com | ® 4-4 As another example, let's say that we wanted to select all users with the username bobby. The query, in this case, would be: 56SELECT username,email,active FROM users WHERE username=' bobby’; The output would look like this: fe | username | email | active | + | bobby | b@devdojo.com | 1 | bobby | bedevdojo.com | 1] + We are getting 2 entries back as we have 2 users in our database with the username bobby. 57Operators In the example, we used the = operator, which checks if the result set matches the value that we are looking for. A list of popular operators are: + !=: Not equal operator +>: Greater than + >=: Greater than or equal operator + <: Less than operator + <=: Less than or equal operator For more information about other available operators, make sure to check the official documentation here. 58AND keyword In some cases, you might want to specify multiple criteria. For example, you might want to get all users that are active, and the username matches a specific value. This could be achieved with the AND keyword, syntax: SELECT * FROM users WHERE username='bobby' AND active=true; The result set would contain the data that matches both conditions. In our case, the output would be: | id | username | about | birthday | active | email | | 2 | bobby = | NULL | NULL I 1 | b@devdojo.com | | 5 | bobby | NULL | NUL | 1 | b@devdojo.com | + If we were to change the AND statement to active=false, we would not get any results back as none of the entries in our database match that condition: SELECT * FROM users WHERE username='bobby' AND active=false; -+ Output: Empty set (0.61 sec) 59OR keyword In some cases, you might want to specify multiple criteria. For example, you might want to get all users that are active, or their username matches a specific value. This could be achieved with the OR keyword. As with any other programming language, the main difference between AND and oR is that with AND, the result would only return the values that match the two conditions, and with oR, you would get a result that matches either of the conditions. For example, if we were to run the same query as above but change the AND to OR, we would get all users that have the username bobby and also all users that are not active: SELECT * FROM users WHERE username='bobby' OR active=false; Output: | username | | 2 | bobby | | | b@devdojo.com | | 3 | devdojo | NULL | | d@devdojo.com | | 5 | bobby | NULL | | badevdojo.com | | 6 | devdojo | | | co NULL d@devdojo.com | 60LIKE operator Unlike the = operator, the LIKE operator allows you to do wildcard matching similar to the * symbol in Linux. For example, if you wanted to get all users that have the y letter in them, you would run the following: SELECT * FROM users WHERE username LIKE '%y%s'; Output | id | username | about | birthday | active | email | trees - a + | 2 | bobby = | NULL | 4 | tony | NULL 1 | b@devdojo.com | 1 | t@devdojo.com | _ + As you can see, we are getting only tony and bobby but not devdojo as there is no y in devdojo This is quite handy when you are building some search functionality for your application. 61N operator The IN operator allows you to provide a list expression and would return the results that match that list of values. For example, if you wanted to get all users that have the username bobby and devdojo, you could use the following: SELECT * FROM users WHERE username IN('bobby', 'devdojo') Output: | id | username | about bedevdojo.com | NULL bobby 121 | [nu | 1| | 3 | devdojo | NULL | NULL | © | d@devdojo.com | | 5 | bobby | NULL | NULL | 1 | bedevdojo.com | 1 6 | devdojo | NULL | NULL | o| d@devdojo.com | This allows you to simplify your WHERE expression so that you don't have to add numerous OR statements. 62IS operator If you were to run SELECT * FROM users WHERE about=NULL; you would get an empty result set as the = operator can't be used to check for NULL values. Instead, you would need to use the IS operator instead. The Is operator is only used to check NULL values, and the syntax is the following: SELECT * FROM users WHERE about IS NULL; If you wanted to get the results where the value is not NULL, you just need to change IS to IS NOT: SELECT * FROM users WHERE about IS NOT NULL; 63Conclusion In this chapter, you've learned how to use the WHERE clause with different operators to get different type of results based on the parameters that you provide. In the next chapter, we will learn how to order the result set. 64Sorting with ORDER and GROUP BY In the last chapter, you've learned how to use the SELECT statement with the WHERE clause and filter the result set based on some conditions. More often than not, you would want to order the results in a specific way based on a particular column. For example, you might want to order the users, alphabetically, based on their username. In this chapter, you will learn how to use the ORDER BY and GROUP BY clauses. 65ORDER BY The main thing that you need to keep in mind when using ORDER BY is that you need to specify the column or columns that you want to order by. In case that you want to specify multiple columns to order by, you need to separate each column with a comma If we were to run the following statement without providing an ORDER BY clause: SELECT id,username FROM users ; We will get the following output: | id | username bobby devdojo tony bobby devdojo tony | | | | I | | I I 5 As you can see, the result set is sorted by the primary key, which in our case is the id of each user. If we wanted to sort the output by username, we would run the following query: SELECT id,username FROM users ORDER BY username; Note the ORDER BY statement followed by the name of the column that we want to order by. 66The output in this case will be: bobby devdojo devdojo tony tony es. Note: You can use ORDER BY with and without specifying a WHERE clause. But in case that you've specified a WHERE clause, you need to put the ORDER BY Clause after the WHERE clause. The default sorting is ascending and is specified with the ASC keyword, and you don't need to explicitly add it, but if you want to sort by descending order, you need to use the DESC keyword. If we use the query above and just add DESC at the end as follows: SELECT id,username FROM users ORDER BY username DESC; We will see the following output 67| id | username | tony | tony | devdojo | devdojo | bobby | bobby nn As you can see, we've got the same list of users sorted alphabetically but in reverse order. 68GROUP BY The GROUP BY statement allows you to use a function like COUNT, MIN, MAX and etc., with multiple columns. For example, let's say that we wanted to get all of the count of all users sorted by username. In our case, we have 2 users with username bobby, 2 users with username tony, and 2 users with username devdojo. This represented in an SQL statement would look like this: SELECT COUNT(username), username FROM users GROUP by username; The output, in this case, would be: fou Ba + | COUNT(username) | username | aoe bobby | devdojo | tony | 2 | 2 2) The GROUP BY statement grouped the usernames that were identical. So bobby, tony and devdojo, and then it ran a COUNT on each of them. The main thing to keep in mind here is that the GROUP BY should be added after the FROM clause and after the WHERE clause in case that you have one. 69INSERT To add data to your database, you would use the INSERT statement. You can insert data into one table at a time only. The syntax is the following: INSERT INTO table_name(column_name_1,column_name_2,column_name_n) VALUES("value_1', ‘value_2', ‘value 3"); You would start with the INSERT INTO statement, followed by the table that you want to insert the data into. Then you would specify the list of the columns that you want to insert the data into. Finally, with the VALUES statement, you specify the data that you want to insert. The important part is that you need to keep the order of the values based on the order of the columns that you've specified In the above example the value_1 would go into column_name_1, the value_2 would go into coLumn_name_2 and the value_3 would go into column_name_x Let's use the table that we created in the last chapter and insert 1 user into our users table: INSERT INTO users(username, email, active) VALUES(‘greisi', ‘g@devdojo.com', true); Rundown of the insert statement: 70+ INSERT INTO users: first, we specify the INSERT INTO keywords which tells MySQL that we want to insert data into the users table. *users (username, email, active): then, we specify the table name users and the columns that we want to insert data into. * VALUES: then, we specify the values that we want to insert in. 71Inserting multiple records We've briefly covered this in one of the previous chapters, but in some cases, you might want to add multiple records in a specific table. Let's say that we wanted to create 5 new users, rather than running 5 different queries like this: INSERT INTO users(username, email, active) VALUES(‘userl', ‘userl@devdojo.com', true); INSERT INTO users(username, email, active) VALUES(‘userl', ‘user2@devdojo.com', true); INSERT INTO users(username, email, active) VALUES(‘userl', ‘user3@devdojo.com', true); INSERT INTO users(username, email, active) VALUES(‘userl', ‘user4@devdojo.com', true); INSERT INTO users(username, email, active) VALUES(‘userl', ‘userS@devdojo.com', true); What you could do is to combine this into one INSERT statement by providing a list of the values that you want to insert as follows: INSERT INTO users (username, email, active ) VALUES. (Cuserl', ‘useri@devdojo.com', true), (user2", ‘user2@devdojo.com', true), ('user3', ‘user3@devdojo.com', true), (user4", ‘userd@devdojo.com', true), (Cuser5', ‘userS@devdojo.com', true); That way, you will add 5 new entries in your users table with a single INSERT statement. This is going to be much more efficient. 72UPDATE ‘As the name suggests, whenever you have to update some data in your database, you would use the UPDATE statement. You can use the UPDATE statement to update multiple columns in a single table. The syntax would look like this: UPDATE users SET username='bobbyiliev' WHERE id=1; Rundown of the statement: + UPDATE users: first, we specify the UPDATE keyword followed by the table that we want to update * username='bobbyiliev' Then we specify the columns that we want to update and the new value that we want to set. * WHERE id=1: Finally, by using the WHERE clause, we specify which user should be updated. In our case, it is the user with ID 1. The most important thing that you need to keep in mind is that if you don't specify a WHERE clause, all of the entries inside the users table would be updated, and all users would have the username set to bobbyiliev. Important: You need to be careful when you use the UPDATE statement without a WHERE Clause as every single row will be updated, If you have been following along alll of the user entries in our users table currently have no data in the about column: 73| id | username | about | 2 | bobby = | NULL 1 3 | devdojo | NULL | 4 | tony | NULL | | 5 | bobby = | NULL | 6 | devdojo | NULL | 7 | tony | NULL + + Let's go ahead and update this for all users and set the column value to 404 bio not found for example: UPDATE users SET about='404 bio not found; The output would let you know how many rows have been affected by the query: Query OK, 6 rows affected (0.62 sec) Rows matched: 6 Changed: 6 Warnings: @ Now, if you were to run a select for all users, you would get the following result: username | about bobby devdojo tony | 404 bio not found | | bobby | | | devdojo tony rs 74Let's now say that we wanted to update the about column for the user with an id of 2. In this case, we need to specify a WHERE clause followed by the ID of the user that we want to update as follows: UPDATE users SET about='Hello World :)' WHERE il The output here should indicate that only 1 row was updated: Query OK, 1 row affected (6.01 sec) Rows matched: 1 Changed: 1 Warnings: 0 Now, if you again run the SELECT id,username, about FROM users query, you would see that the user with id '2' now has an updated about column data: | id | username | bobby Hello World :) 121 | I | 3 | devdojo | 404 bio not found | | 4 | tony | 404 bio not found | | 5 | bobby | 404 bio not found | | 6 | devdojo | 404 bio not found | 1 7 | tony | I te + 404 bio not found weyDELETE As the name suggests, the DELETE statement would remove data from your database. The syntax is as follows: DELETE FROM users WHERE id=5; The output should indicate that 1 row was affected: Query OK, 1 row affected (8.01 sec) Important: Just like the UPDATE statement, if you don't specify a WHERE clause, all of the entries from the table will be affected, meaning that all of your users will be deleted. So it is critical to always add a WHERE clause when executing a DELETE statement. Similar to the Linux rm command, when you use the DELETE statement, the data would be gone permanently, and the only way to recover your data would be by restoring a backup. 76JOIN The JOIN clause allows you to combine the data from 2 or more tables into one result set. As we will be selecting from multiple columns, we would need to include the list of the columns that we want to select data from after the FROM clause separated by a comma. In this chapter, we will go over the following JOIN types: * CROSS Join + INNER Join * LEFT Join + RIGHT Join Before we get started, let's create a new database and 2 tables that we are going to work with: + We are going to call the database demo_joins: CREATE DATABASE demo_joins; * Then switch to the new database: USE demo_joins; + Then the first table will be called users and it will only have 2 columns: id and username: 77CREATE TABLE users ( id INT PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT, username VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL i + Then let's create a second table called posts, and to keep things simple we will have three two columns: id, user_id and title: CREATE TABLE posts ( id INT PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT, user_id INT, title VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL MF The user_id column would be used to reference the ID of the user that the post belongs to. It is going to be a one to many relation, e.g. one user could have many post: id int | ross i int username varchar user_id int title varchar + Now, let's add some data into the two tables first by creating a few users: 78INSERT INTO users ( username ) VALUES ('bobby"), (‘devdojo'), (‘tony'), (Cgreisi'); + And finally add some posts: INSERT INTO posts ( user_id, title ) VALUES an ers (3! (iene a "Hello World!'), "Getting started with SQL"), "SQL is awesome’), "MySQL is up!'), "SQL - structured query Language’); Now that we've got our tables and demo data ready let's go ahead and learn how to use joins. 79Cross join The CROSS join allows you to basically put the result of two tables next to each other without specifying any WHERE conditions. This makes the CROSS join the simplest one, but it also not of much use in a real-life scenario. So if we were to select all of the users and all of the posts side by side, we will use the following query: SELECT * FROM users CROSS JOIN posts; The output will be all of your users and all of the posts side by side: 80| id | username | id Juser_id | title | | 4 | greisi | 1] 1 | Hello World! = | | 3 | tony Ia] 1 | Hello Wortd! | | 2 | devdojo | 1 | 1 | Hello Wortd! | | 1] bobby | 1] 1 | Hello Wortd! | | 4] greisi | 2] 2 | Getting started | | 3 | tony 121 2 | Getting started | | 2 | devdojo | 2 | 2 | Getting started | | 1 | bobby | 2] 2 | Getting started | | 4 | greisi | 3] 3 | SQL is awesome | | 3 | tony | 3] 3 | SQL is awesome | | 2 | devdojo | 3 | 3 | SQL is awesome | | 1 | bobby | 3] 3 | SQL is awesome | | 4] greisi | 4 | 2 | MySQL is up! | | 3 | tony l4t 2 | MySQL is up! | | 2 | devdojo | 4 | 2 | MySQL is up! | | 1] bobby | 4| 2 | MySQL is up! | | 4] greisi | 5 | 1 | SOL | | 3| tony | 5] 1 | soL | | 2 | devdojo | 5 | 1 | sau | | 1| bobby | 5 | 1 | SOL | + + ‘As mentioned above, in a real-life scenario, you will highly unlikely run a CROSS join for two whole tables. You would most likey use one of the following joins instead combined with a specific condition 81Inner join The INNER join is used to join two tables, however, unlike the CROSS join, it is based on a condition. By using an INNER join, you can match the first table to the second one. ‘As we have a one-to-many relationship, a best practice would be to use a primary key for the posts id column and a foreign key for the user_id; that way, we can ‘link! or relate the users table to the posts table. However, this is beyond the scope of this SQL basics eBook, though I might extend it in the future and add more chapters. As an example and to make things a bit clearer, let's say that you wanted to get all of your users and the posts associated with each user. The query that we would use will look like this: SELECT * FROM users INNER JOIN posts ON users.id = posts.user_id; Rundown of the query: * SELECT * FROM users: this is a standard select that we've covered many times in the previous chapters. * INNER JOIN posts: then we specify the second table, which table we want to join the result set with + ON users.id = posts.user_id: finally, we specify the logic on how we want the data in these two tables to be merged together. The user. id is the id column of the user table, which is also the primary ID, and posts.user_id is the foreign key in the email address table referring to the ID column in the users table. The output will be the following, associating each user with their post based on the user_id column: 82| id | username | id | user_id | title bobby | 1] 1 | Hello World! devdojo | 2 | 2 | Getting started tony 131 3 | SOL is awesome devdojo | 4 | 2 | MySQL is up! bobby | 5 | 1 | sau $—-—--— 4+ The main things that you need to keep in mind here are the INNER JOIN and ON clauses. With the inner join, the NULL values are discarded. For example, if you have a user who does not have a post associated with it, when running the above INNER join query, the user that has NULL posts will not be displayed. To get the null values as well, you would need to use an outer join. 83Left join By using the LEFT OUTER join, you would get all rows from the first table that you've specified, and if there are no associated records with it within the second table, you will get a NULL value. In our case, we have a user called graisi, which is not associated with a specific post. As you can see from the output from the previous query, the graisi user was not present in there. To show that user even though it does not have an associated post with it, you could use a LEFT OUTER join: SELECT * FROM users LEFT JOIN posts ON users. id = posts.user_id; The output will look like this: username | id | | 1 | bobby | 14 1 | Hello World! — | | 2 | devdojo | 2] 2 | Getting started | | 3 | tony | 34 3 | SQL is awesome | | 2 | devdojo | 4] 2 | MySQL is up! | | 1 | bobby | 5] 1 | sot | | 4 | greisi | NULL | — NULL | NULL | toe oo + 84Right join The RIGHT OUTER join is the exact opposite of the LEFT OUTER join. It will display all of the rows from the second table and give you a NULL value in case that it does not match with an entry from the first table. Let's create a post that does not have a matching user id: INSERT INTO posts ( user_id, title ) VALUES ("123', 'No user post!"); We are specifying 123 as the user ID, but we don't have such a user in our users table. Now, if you were to run the LEFT outer join, you would not see the post as it has a null value for the corresponding users table. But if you were to run a RIGHT outer join, you would see the post but not the greisi user as it does not have any posts: SELECT * FROM users RIGHT JOIN posts ON users. id = posts.user_id; Output: 85username | id bobby 12 devdojo | 2 tony | 3 devdojo | 4 bobby | 5 NULL | 6 | user_id 86 title Hello World! Getting started SOL is awesome MySQL is up! sol No user post!Conclusion The whole concept of joins might be very confusing in the beginning but would make a lot of sense once you get used to it. The best way to wrap your head around it is to write some queries and play around with each type of JOIN and see how the result set changes. For more information, you could take a look at the official documentation here. 87The MySQL dump command There are many ways and tools on how to export or backup your MySQL databases. In my opinion, mysqldump is a great tool to accomplish this task. The mysqldump tool can be used to dump a database or a collection of databases for backup or transfer to another database server (not necessarily MariaDB or MySQL). The dump typically contains SQL statements to create the table, populate it, or both. One of the main benefits of mysqldump is that it is available out of the box on almost all shared hosting servers. So if you are hosting your database on a cPanel server that you don't have root access to, you could still use it to export larger databases. 88Exporting a Database In order to export/backup a database, all you need to do is run the following command: mysqldump -u your_username -p your_database_name > your_database_name-$(date +%F).sql Note that you need to change the your_database_name with the actual name of your database and the your_username part with your actual MySQL username. Rundown of the arguments: + -u: needs to be followed by your MySQL username + -p: indicates that you would be prompted for your MySQL password + >: indicates that the output of the command should be stored in the .sq] file that you specify after that sign By running the above command, you would create an export of your database, which you could later use as a backup or even transfer it to another server. 89Exporting all databases If you have root access to the server, you could use the --al1- databases flag in order to export all of the databases hosted on the particular MySQL server. The downside of this approach is that this would create one single .sql export, which would contain all of the databases. Let's say that you would like to export each database into a separate .sq| file, You could do that with the following script: 90#!/bin/bash Ht # Get a list of all databases except the system databases tha are not needed Ht DATABASES=$(echo “show databases; " | mysql | grep -Ev "(Database | information_schema|mysql|performance_schema)") DATE=$(date +%d%m®Y) TIME=$(date +%s) BACKUP_DIR=/home/your_user/backup Ht # Create Backup Directory a if [ ! -d ${BACKUP_DIR} ]; then mkdir -p ${BACKUP_DIR} fi ccd # Backup all databases Ht for DB in $DATABASES do mysqldump --single-transaction --skip-lock-tables $DB gzip > ${BACKUP_DIR}/$DATE-$DB. sql.gz done The script would backup each database and would store the .sql dumps in the /home/your_user/backup folder. Make sure to adjust the path to your backup folder. For more information on Bash scripting check out this opensource eBook here. 91Automated backups You can even set a cronjob to automate the backups above, that way you would have regular backups of your databases. In order to do that, you need to make sure that you have the following content in your .my. cnf file. The file should be stored at: /home/your_user/.my..cnf You should make sure that it has secure permissions: chmod 600 /home/your_user/.my.cnf And you should add the following content: [client] user=your_mysql_user password=your_mysql_password Once you have your .my. cnf file configured, you set up a cronjob to trigger the mysqldump export of your database: © 10,22 * * * /usr/bin/mysqldump -u your_username -p your_database_name > your_database_name-$(date +%F) .sql The above would run at 10 AM and 10 PM every day, so you will have 2 daily backups of your database. 92You can even expand the logic and add a compression step so that the sql dumps do not consume too much webspace. 93Conclusion The mysqldump is a great tool to easily and quickly backup your MySQL databases. For more information, you could take a look at the official documentation here: + mysqldump This was originally posted here. 94Conclusion Congratulations! You have just completed the SQL basics guide! If you found this helpful, be sure to star the project on GitHub! If you have any suggestions for improvements, make sure to contribute pull requests or open issues. In this introduction to SQL eBook, we just covered the basics, but you still have enough under your belt to start working with any relational database out there! As a next step, try to create a database server, import some demo data, and play around with all of the statements that you've learned so far. You can also take a look at this website here to help you build your tables and relations and visualize them: https://dbdiagram.io/ In case that this eBook inspired you to contribute to some fantastic open-source project, make sure to tweet about it and tag @bobbyiliev. so that we could check it out! Congrats again on completing this eBook! 95Other eBooks Some other opensource eBooks that you might find helpful are: * Introduction to Git and GitHi + Introduction to Bash Scripting 96