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SQL Grinds / advice (Beginners)

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  • 18-11-2012 3:52pm
    #1
    Sql
    Registered Users Posts: 10 ✭


    Hi,

    I am urgently in need of either a SQL grind or, if I'm lucky, someone who I can email with questions. I have no experience of SQL and would like to learn it ASAP.

    If you know of anyone who may be of assistance, I would be eternally grateful :) Feel free to send me PM.


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    #2
    lemon_remon
    Registered Users Posts: 232 ✭✭lemon_remon


    I think this book is supposed to be alright, why don't you give that a go? There should be questions you can try in the book and if you have any problems then do a search into your favourite search engine and if you can't find anything about it then ask on stackoverflow.com. To learn SQL you really need to practise it, the book should probably tell you how to set up your own MySQL server but if it doesn't there's plenty of guides online. Otherwise they probably have a server set up for you on your course, I know we do in Computer Science anyway.


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    #3
    Sql
    Registered Users Posts: 10 ✭Sql


    Thank you for all of that advice :) I'm afraid I'm such a beginner that I don't quite understand the link between SQL and servers?

    I looked at a SQL program this morning and had no idea how to start showing a basic table. I clicked a few buttons and then panicked and switched it off!!


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    #4
    lemon_remon
    Registered Users Posts: 232 ✭✭lemon_remon


    SQL is a language for talking to databases. A database is just a colletion of data, like who your friends are on Facebook, what posts you have made on boards.ie etc. All this information is stored in a database and you need some way to access it. SQL is a language that databases understand, much like a human might understand English, a database might understand SQL. There are of course other ways of talking to databases and SQL is just one of them. SQL stands for Structured Query Language and is just that a language. The program you were using just allows you to talk to a database server (explained below) with SQL. The program you were running is just a "middleman" for this.

    As I said before, a database is just a collection of data, this data needs somewhere to be stored, just like anything on a computer such as music, pictures etc need to be stored on your hard drive somewhere, a database needs to be stored on a hard drive somewhere. It's normally stored on a special kind of computer called a server. The computer is called a server because it serves the database to other computers, it generally doesn't use the data itself, it just gives it to other computers. Any computer could be a database server if you set it up to be, it would just need to run the database software.

    Data in SQL is represented in tables, so on Facebook they probably have a table that stores information about users, for example it might store their name and date of birth. You can write SQL to create these tables and you can also write SQL to read from these tables, that is the main chunk of what you have to learn with SQL. The book I recommended should hopefully go into details on this. If you have any more questions feel free to pm me or you could also try here which is the boards forum for these kinda topics.


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    #5
    elusiveguy
    Registered Users Posts: 535 ✭✭✭elusiveguy


    http://www.w3schools.com/sql/default.asp


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    #6
    lemon_remon
    Registered Users Posts: 232 ✭✭lemon_remon


    elusiveguy wrote: »
    http://www.w3schools.com/sql/default.asp

    http://w3fools.com/


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