MySQL Developer's SQL Guide

This book is a SQL tutorial and reference manual for MySQL developers by the Dutch database expert Rick F. van der Lans, translated from the 2007 Addison-Wesley English edition SQL for MySQL Developers: A Comprehensive Tutorial and Reference and published by China Machine Press in its Hua Zhang Programmer's Library series. The book runs throughout on the author's long-used sample database of a tennis club (with tables for players, teams, matches, penalties, and so on). It first introduces the relational model, the SQL standard, and the development of MySQL, then proceeds through four levels: querying and updating data, creating database objects, procedural database objects, and SQL programming. The query section begins with literals, expressions, scalar functions, NULL, and CASE expressions, then analyzes the SELECT statement clause by clause—FROM, WHERE, SELECT and aggregate functions, GROUP BY, HAVING, ORDER BY, and LIMIT—and extends to combining table expressions, user variables, the HANDLER statement, and subqueries. The update section covers loading and unloading data with INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, and LOAD DATA, as well as handling XML documents. The database-and-table-creation section explains columns and data types, integrity constraints such as primary and foreign keys, character sets and collations, the ENUM and SET types, indexes, views, creating databases, users and privilege security, table-maintenance statements, and metadata queries with SHOW, DESCRIBE, and HELP. Part Four discusses stored procedures, stored functions, triggers, and events; Part Five introduces embedding SQL in PHP, prepared statements and dynamic SQL, and multi-user concurrency issues such as transactions, locking, rollback, and isolation levels. Each chapter includes exercises with answers, and the book ends with appendices on SQL syntax, scalar functions, and system variables for quick reference.