Rechercher dans le manuel MySQL
3.3.2 Creating a Table
Creating the database is the easy part, but at this point it is
empty, as SHOW TABLES
tells you:
The harder part is deciding what the structure of your database should be: what tables you need and what columns should be in each of them.
You want a table that contains a record for each of your pets.
This can be called the pet
table, and it
should contain, as a bare minimum, each animal's name. Because
the name by itself is not very interesting, the table should
contain other information. For example, if more than one person
in your family keeps pets, you might want to list each animal's
owner. You might also want to record some basic descriptive
information such as species and sex.
How about age? That might be of interest, but it is not a good thing to store in a database. Age changes as time passes, which means you'd have to update your records often. Instead, it is better to store a fixed value such as date of birth. Then, whenever you need age, you can calculate it as the difference between the current date and the birth date. MySQL provides functions for doing date arithmetic, so this is not difficult. Storing birth date rather than age has other advantages, too:
You can use the database for tasks such as generating reminders for upcoming pet birthdays. (If you think this type of query is somewhat silly, note that it is the same question you might ask in the context of a business database to identify clients to whom you need to send out birthday greetings in the current week or month, for that computer-assisted personal touch.)
You can calculate age in relation to dates other than the current date. For example, if you store death date in the database, you can easily calculate how old a pet was when it died.
You can probably think of other types of information that would
be useful in the pet
table, but the ones
identified so far are sufficient: name, owner, species, sex,
birth, and death.
Use a CREATE TABLE
statement to
specify the layout of your table:
VARCHAR
is a good choice for the
name
, owner
, and
species
columns because the column values
vary in length. The lengths in those column definitions need not
all be the same, and need not be 20
. You can
normally pick any length from 1
to
65535
, whatever seems most reasonable to you.
If you make a poor choice and it turns out later that you need a
longer field, MySQL provides an ALTER
TABLE
statement.
Several types of values can be chosen to represent sex in animal
records, such as 'm'
and
'f'
, or perhaps 'male'
and
'female'
. It is simplest to use the single
characters 'm'
and 'f'
.
The use of the DATE
data type for
the birth
and death
columns is a fairly obvious choice.
Once you have created a table, SHOW
TABLES
should produce some output:
- +---------------------+
- +---------------------+
- | pet |
- +---------------------+
To verify that your table was created the way you expected, use
a DESCRIBE
statement:
- +---------+-------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
- +---------+-------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
- +---------+-------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
You can use DESCRIBE
any time,
for example, if you forget the names of the columns in your
table or what types they have.
For more information about MySQL data types, see Chapter 11, Data Types.
Traduction non disponible
Le manuel MySQL n'est pas encore traduit en français sur l'infobrol. Seule la version anglaise est disponible pour l'instant.
Document créé le 26/06/2006, dernière modification le 26/10/2018
Source du document imprimé : https://www.gaudry.be/mysql-rf-creating-tables.html
L'infobrol est un site personnel dont le contenu n'engage que moi. Le texte est mis à disposition sous licence CreativeCommons(BY-NC-SA). Plus d'info sur les conditions d'utilisation et sur l'auteur.
Références
Ces références et liens indiquent des documents consultés lors de la rédaction de cette page, ou qui peuvent apporter un complément d'information, mais les auteurs de ces sources ne peuvent être tenus responsables du contenu de cette page.
L'auteur de ce site est seul responsable de la manière dont sont présentés ici les différents concepts, et des libertés qui sont prises avec les ouvrages de référence. N'oubliez pas que vous devez croiser les informations de sources multiples afin de diminuer les risques d'erreurs.