MySQL and mSQL

Creating and Dropping Tables

With MySQL or mSQL successfully installed, you should now be ready to create your first table. The table, a structured container of data, is the basic concept in a relational database. Before you can begin adding data to a table, you must define the table’s structure. Consider the following layout:

+---------------------------------+
|             people              |
+-------------+-------------------+
| name        | char(10) not null |
| address     | text(100)         |
| id          | int               |
+-------------+-------------------+

Not only does the table contain the names of the columns, but it also contains the types of each field as well as any additional information the fields may have. A field’s datatype specified what kind of data the field can hold. SQL datatypes are similar to datatypes in other programming languages. The full SQL standard allows for a large range of datatypes. MySQL implements most of them, while mSQL contains only a few of the most useful types.

The general syntax for table creation is:

CREATE TABLE table_name (column_name1 type [modifiers]
                      [, column_name2 type [modifiers]]
)

Note

What constitutes a valid identifier—a name for a table or column—varies from DBMS to DBMS. mSQL provides close to the bare minimum support for names. It accepts any sequence of International Standards Organization (ISO) 8859-1 (Latin 1) letters, numbers, or `_' up to 20 characters as a valid identifier. An identifier must begin with a letter. Good database design only encounters problems with the ISO 8859-1 ...