SQL is an excellent language for those working in business or with data. Career Karma has a list of excellent resources to help you learn SQL, especially if you are a beginner. There are great resources for ways to sharpen your skills and enhance your portfolio. There are also extensive how-to guides and step-by-step guides geared towards specific SQL and SQL-related practices.
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SQL Add Column: A How-To Guide
There is no SQL ADD COLUMN statement. To add a column to an SQL table, you must use the ALTER TABLE ADD syntax. ALTER TABLE lets you add, delete, or modify columns in a table. After you have created a…
SQL EXISTS: How to use this SQL Operator
There are many things you can do to define a query in SQL. One thing you can do to a WHERE clause is check to see if a row exists with the matching parameters in the database. We do this…
SQL Triggers
An SQL Trigger is an event that sets off a number of other events that happens when a user interacts with a particular table. This particular SQL statement helps by validating form data, or enforcing rules. A trigger is executed…
Using MySQL’s IF(), NULLIF(), and IFNULL() Functions
Just like other programming languages, the structured query language has conditional statements that control the flow of data. The IF function returns a statement if condition is met and another type statement (or none at all) if not met. Let’s…
SQL Substr() Function
Sometimes we need just a portion of a string value in our data to display. There is a string function we use called SUBSTR(). There is also an equivalent function called SUBSTRING(). In this article, we cover using this substring…
SQL Having
SQL has different types of operations used to make queries to a database. SQL’s HAVING statement works like a subquery on top of an initial query. It works well when you have an overwhelming amount of entries that have one…
How to Use the SQL Contains Command
There are many SQL statements and functions to query your database and retrieve or figure out useful information. One such function is the CONTAINS() function. This particular statement is not a standard SQL function – depending on which database you…
How to Build a Query Using the SQL Concatenate Function
When working with queries, sometimes we need to take raw data from our database and reformat it in a different way for use elsewhere. In this article, we look at a couple of functions in MySQL to help us work…
SQL Constraints: A Beginner’s Guide
One of the great features of databases is that they can restrict the types of values stored in a particular column. This means that you don’t need to validate every value before you try to insert it into a database.…
How to Use the SQL INSERT Statement
Have you ever wondered how data is added to a database? Behind every record in a database is an INSERT INTO statement. Without this statement, databases could not store data! In this guide, we’re going to talk about what the…
How to Use the SQL SELECT Statement
Databases do not just store information, they make data easily accessible. With a little help from the SELECT statement, you can retrieve any set of values from a database that you need. In this guide, we’re going to discuss what…
SQL UPDATE: A Guide
How to Use the SQL UPDATE Statement One of the core features of databases is that stored values can be updated. You can change the values of any record in a database at any time. Values inside an SQL database…
SQL Comments Using Single- and Multiline Comments
There are two types of comments in SQL statements: single-line and multi-line. We’ll take a look at these in our article with an example of each and discuss why we might use comments When we make comments in our code,…
What are Primary Keys and Foreign Keys?
When you’re storing data in a database, you need to have some way to identify each record that you are storing. Otherwise, it would be impossible to retrieve exactly the right record if it shared the same values as other…
SQL Union
When you’re querying a database, you may want to combine the result of two or more SELECT statements. For example, you may want to get a list of the cities in which your customers are based, and the cities in…
SQL Outer Join
When you’re working with a database, you may want to query two or more tables at the same time and create a combined set of results. For example, you may want to find out the names of every employee and…
SQL Case
When you’re working with a database, you may want to run an if/then operation in your query. For example, you may want to go through a list of employees and change their probation status if they have been working with…
SQL Distinct
When you’re working with a database, there may be times when you want to get all of the unique values in a particular dataset. For example, you may want to get a list of the names of products you have…
MySQL vs SQL Server: A Side-by-Side Look
Data makes the business world go ‘round, and managing that data takes dedicated frontend and backend systems. Relational database management systems such as MySQL and SQL Server ensure that developers can access and update data efficiently and without issue. To…
