How to create a basic SQL table
Introduction:
Database tables can be created explicitly or in other ways, such as from an existing table. When creating tables, options can be specified for the tables contents, as well.
Requirements:
This example uses the MySQL relational database. A database on the database server must already exist.
Procedure:
Once the connection the database server has been established, you will need to create a table within a database. This could have several behaviors. If there is no default database, you could declare the default database with:
use NAME_OF_DATABASE;
Otherwise, you can specify the database’s name within the table declaration. The database on the database server must already exist, many can exist for any one database server.
To create a table, simply enter:
create table TABLE_NAME (COLUMN_NAME int, COLUMN_TWO_NAME varchar(30));
when a default database has been selected. This will create a table, arbitrarily with two columns of two different data types.
To specify the database in the creation statement:
create table DATABASE_NAME.TABLE_NAME (COLUMN_NAME int, COLUMN_TWO_NAME varchar(30));
Indexes can also be specified in the table creation statement.
To view the definition of the table, you could either use:
describe TABLE_NAME
or:
show create table TABLE_NAME
