Relational Databases and SQL

Copyright 2002, Ken Abernethy and Tom Allen

This material is designed for the use with the text Exploring the Digital Domain, Second Edition. It is illegal to distribute, modify, or make any other commercial use of this material without the explicit permission of the copyright holders.

In this module, you will learn the basic concepts of relational databases and the SQL (Structured Query Language) query/update language which is the defacto standard language for interacting with these databases. You will get ample opportunity to apply your new understanding to concrete examples. We will utilize the Microsoft Access relational database system for your practice.

More particularly, you will:

• understand the relational database model
• learn the basic commands in SQL for retrieving data from a relational database
• learn how to sort retrieved database data using SQL
• learn how to filter data to make selective database retrievals using SQL
• learn how to summarize and group data in retrievals using SQL