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SQL Unit 10Creating Tables, Adding Constraints, and

Defining Indexes

Kirk Scott

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• 10.1 The Keyword CREATE• 10.2 Background on General Constraints• 10.3 Syntax for General Constraints• 10.4 What are Indexes?• 10.5 Syntax for Indexes

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10.1 The Keyword CREATE

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10.1.1 Creating Tables

• Microsoft Access has a graphical user interface for defining database tables.

• This interface allows you to name the fields in a table, specify their types and sizes, designate a key, and also add various kinds of formatting, data integrity, and referential integrity constraints.

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• Assuming you already have an understanding of relational databases, this is probably the preferred way of creating a table definition.

• It will covered in Unit 12, when explaining the final project assignment.

• In the meantime, it is still useful to learn how to do these things in SQL.

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• Dealing with SQL syntax is not as convenient as dealing with a graphical user interface, but using SQL has the advantage that everything is made explicit.

• If you have mastered the SQL, then it's safe to say that you will be able to manage the kinds of things you'll find in the graphical user interface.

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• The converse is less likely to be the case. • Working with the interface may not be the

easiest way to get a clear, organized picture of what table creation is all about.

• Certain critical points may be hidden in the interface and easily overlooked.

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• An example is given below of using the CREATE TABLE command in SQL, where one of the tables of the sample database is created.

• Everything that is shown is correct, and it is sufficient to create the table.

• In this command the primary key is not designated.

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• In the long run, this is not ideal, but it is acceptable.

• Under the covers, the system will in effect supply a hidden primary key which it will use to prevent duplicate records, and so on.

• The syntax for specifying primary and foreign key fields will be given later in this unit.

• Notice that the SQL syntax parallels the schema notation for a table.

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• CREATE TABLE Car• (vin TEXT(5),• make TEXT(18),• model TEXT(18),• year TEXT(4),• stickerprice CURRENCY,• dealercost CURRENCY)

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• Although strictly speaking the command above is not a query, it can be entered as a query in Microsoft Access using the SQL editor.

• Clicking the execute button will cause the table to come into existence.

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10.2 Background for General Constraints

• 1. An example of creating a table using SQL is given on the next overhead.

• The fields and their types and sizes are defined.

• The primary key field is not defined.• This example will be used to illustrate how

other characteristics, or constraints, can be added to the table definition.

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• CREATE TABLE Person• (SSN TEXT(9),• lastname TEXT(12),• dob DATE)

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• In a complete table definition it would be desirable to specify the primary key.

• Remember that the primary key value has to be a unique identifier for each record in the table and no part of the primary key can be null.

• These requirements together are formally known as entity integrity.

• Defining a primary key field is a kind of constraint, which will be shown shortly.

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• 2. It may be desirable to require that other fields in a table besides the primary key be unique or not null.

• It is possible to have a situation like this: • The Person table is redefined so that it has a

personid field which is different from the SSN, but the SSN is still included.

• This is shown on the next overhead.

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• CREATE TABLE Person• (personid TEXT(12),• lastname TEXT(12),• dob DATE,• SSN TEXT(9))

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• In a situation like this, the personid should be unique and not null, because it's the key.

• It would also be desirable for the SSN to be unique and probably not null.

• Enforcing this would be another kind of constraint that could be added to the table definition.

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• It is also possible to have a situation where it is possible for a field to have duplicate values in different records, but you don't want to allow null values.

• For example, in the Person table, you may not wish to allow entries for people who do not have names.

• This is yet another example where a constraint would be used.

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• 3. Referential integrity defines the requirements for a primary key to foreign key relationship between two tables or between a table and itself.

• Consider this alternative definition of the Person table:• • CREATE TABLE Person• (SSN TEXT(9),• lastname TEXT(12),• motherSSN TEXT(9),• dob DATE)

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• Let there be a Mother table which also has a primary key named SSN.

• The motherSSN field in the Person table is known as a foreign key and it refers to the SSN field in the Mother table.

• Referential integrity states that the motherSSN field in the Person table cannot contain values which do not exist in the SSN field in the Mother table.

• Enforcing referential integrity is another kind of constraint.

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• 4. When including additional specifications or conditions in a table definition, these are known generally as constraints.

• In general, it is also possible to add constraints to table definitions after the tables have been created.

• This unit will cover including constraints in the original definition.

• The next unit will cover adding or dropping constraints after a table has been created.

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• If constraints are named, this makes it possible to refer to them later on, in particular, so that they can be removed from the table.

• There are various forms of the syntax for constraints.

• Not all of the forms will be shown below, just a consistent set of forms that should be relatively easy to remember.

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10.3 Syntax for General Constraints

• 1. This example shows the syntax for specifying a primary key in a table definition:

• • CREATE TABLE Person• (SSN TEXT(9),• lastname TEXT(12),• dob DATE,• CONSTRAINT personpkSSN PRIMARY KEY(SSN))

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• As usual, the keywords are capitalized. • The field name SSN happens to be capitalized

too in this example, but that is a coincidence. • It is a good idea to give the constraint a

descriptive name. • The name can't have spaces in it.

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• 2. Recall that it is possible to have a table with a concatenated key field.

• This means that the unique identifier for a record in the table is the combination of the values of two different fields in the table.

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• This can happen when there is a many-to-many relationship, and the primary keys of both of the tables in the many-to-many relationship are embedded as foreign keys in a table in the middle.

• Assuming that there was a Chimpanzee table with chimpid as its primary key, the relationships between chimps could be captured by the table design given in the next example.

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• The table's primary key would be the concatenation of chimpid1 and chimpid2.

• You could specify the primary key by including the line shown at the end of the table definition.

• All you have to do is list the concatenated key fields inside the parentheses, separated by commas.

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• CREATE TABLE Chimprelationships• (chimpid1 TEXT(6),• chimpid2 TEXT(6),• beginningdate DATE,• enddate DATE,• CONSTRAINT chimppk PRIMARY

KEY(chimpid1, chimpid2))

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• 3. The next example shows the syntax for specifying the primary key and also for specifying that another field in the table be unique.

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• CREATE TABLE Person• (personid TEXT(12),• lastname TEXT(12),• dob DATE,• SSN TEXT(9),• CONSTRAINT personpkpersonid PRIMARY

KEY(personid),• CONSTRAINT SSNunique UNIQUE(SSN))

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• The personid field will be constrained to be unique because it's the primary key.

• The SSN field will be constrained to be unique by the separate uniqueness constraint on it.

• As before, the key words are shown capitalized.

• It's a coincidence that the field SSN is also capitalized.

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• 4. Specifying NOT NULL as a constraint on a table is slightly different from the other constraints, because it is not named.

• All you have to do is put the constraint after the relevant field in the table definition:

• This is shown on the next overhead.

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• CREATE TABLE Person• (SSN TEXT(9),• lastname TEXT(12) NOT NULL,• dob DATE)

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• 5. When putting a referential integrity constraint into a database design, the constraint goes into the foreign key table, not the primary key table.

• Let there be a table named Mother with a primary key field defined as shown on the next overhead.

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• CREATE TABLE Mother• (SSN TEXT(9),• …,• CONSTRAINT motherpkSSN PRIMARY

KEY(SSN))

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• Then a foreign key constraint in the Person table would be as shown on the next overhead.

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• CREATE TABLE Person• (SSN TEXT(9),• lastname TEXT(12),• motherSSN TEXT(9),• dob DATE,• CONSTRAINT personpkSSN PRIMARY KEY(SSN),• CONSTRAINT personfkmother FOREIGN

KEY(motherSSN) REFERENCES Mother(SSN))

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• Notice that there are two sides to the foreign key constraint.

• It is not possible to enter new values into the foreign key table, or update values in the foreign key table to ones that don't exist in the primary key table.

• It would also violate referential integrity if there were changes in the primary key table that left values in the foreign key table without matches in the primary key table.

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• Referential integrity is so important that the system also protects the database contents from changes in the primary key table.

• There are two possibilities: • 1) If a primary key record is deleted, if it had

corresponding foreign key records, they would be orphaned.

• It is most common in this case to disallow such deletions.

• This is known as "ON DELETE RESTRICT".

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• 2) If the primary key value is updated, if that value had matches in the foreign key table, they would be orphaned.

• It is most common in this case to specify that the corresponding foreign key records be updated to match.

• This is known as "ON UPDATE CASCADE".

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• The next overhead shows how the foreign key constraint example would look with DELETE and UPDATE restrictions/cascades explicitly specified:

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• CREATE TABLE Person• (SSN TEXT(9),• lastname TEXT(12),• motherSSN TEXT(9),• dob DATE,• CONSTRAINT personpkSSN PRIMARY KEY(SSN),• CONSTRAINT personfkmother FOREIGN KEY(motherSSN)• REFERENCES Mother(SSN)• ON DELETE RESTRICT• ON UPDATE CASCADE)

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• Notice that with these options set, the system is doing a lot of work on behalf of the user, protecting the integrity of the data in the related tables.

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10.4 What are Indexes?

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• 1. An index can be described as a construct that supports two-column lookup.

• Suppose you're interested in words and their locations in a book.

• You look up the word in the index, and what you find is its page number.

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• This is a somewhat more detailed description of the situation:

• A) The words in a book don't occur in sorted order.

• They appear in sentences and paragraphs in an order that is determined by the topic under discussion and the rules of grammar.

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• B) The index of a book consists of the important words in the book sorted in alphabetical order, followed by the page numbers where those words appear.

• This is your two column lookup. • You look up the word, and what you find is the

page where it occurs.

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• 2. Being able to look things up is critical to the internal operation of a database management system and the execution of queries.

• Remember that technically tables are like sets:

• Their contents do not have to be kept in any particular order.

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• If you want to see the contents of tables in sorted order, you know that you can put the key words ORDER BY in a query, but this doesn't change the order in which the records are stored.

• You may have noticed that if you don't specify ORDER BY in a query, the results tend to come out sorted in primary key order.

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• This still doesn't signify that the contents of the table are maintained in that order.

• It just means that that order may be the default order for results in some cases.

• It is generally the case that the records in a table are simply stored in the same order that they were entered into the table.

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• Shown below is a very simple example of a situation like this.

• The records are not sorted on any of the data fields.

• In order to keep track of what's going on, an extra field is shown which simply indicates which is first, which is second, and so on.

• The technical term for this extra field is the relative record number, and it is abbreviated RRN:

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Simple Person TableRRN idno name age1 2 Pam 202 4 Lee 183 1 Ned 214 3 Kim 22

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• It should be clear that if you know the RRN for a given record, then it is easy to find that record and all of the data values that go with it.

• The RRN is analogous to a page number in the book index example.

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• It is important to emphasize that the RRN is invisible to the database user.

• You never see this as part of a table. • However, it is conceptually useful to talk about

RRN's when trying to explain what a database index is and how it works.

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• 3. An index in a database management system is a data structure separate from a table that makes it possible for the system to easily find specified information.

• Suppose you frequently wanted to look up records for the people in the example table by idno.

• You could specify that the system maintain an index on idno.

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• The little example table given above is shown again on the next overhead.

• Along with it is shown a conceptual representation of an index on the idno field.

• The index is not actually maintained as a two-column lookup table and the index is invisible to the user, but the example illustrates how it can aid in data retrieval.

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Indexidno RRN1 32 13 44 2

Simple Person TableRRN idno name age1 2 Pam 202 4 Lee 183 1 Ned 214 3 Kim 22

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• Doing the lookup consists of these two steps: First look up the idno in the index, where you find the RRN.

• Then use the RRN to find the corresponding record in the table.

• For the first step, it is not hard to find one out of a set of values when they’re maintained in sorted order.

• For the second step, it is straightforward to find the corresponding record when given its RRN.

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• The result is that if an index on the desired field exists, a query that uses the index will run more quickly than a query that doesn’t.

• Just to emphasize what an index is and how it gives improved access to the contents of a table, here are lookup table representations of indexes on the other two fields of the Simple Person table:

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Indexname RRNKim 4Lee 2Ned 3Pam 1

Indexage RRN18 420 221 122 3

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• 4. There is syntax in SQL that allows you to specify that a given table have an index on a given field.

• The index is created when the command is given, and from that point on the system will maintain the index.

• A table is not indexed on all fields by default—that’s why it’s necessary for the user to specifically create one.

• There is also syntax to remove an index if it is no longer wanted.

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• The benefits and uses of indexes can be more completely outlined as follows:

• The benefits of indexes come at query execution time.

• For example, if you write a query that requests that the results be ordered on a given field, that will be speeded up if there is an index on that field.

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• If you write a query that has a WHERE clause on a given field, finding the records that match will be speeded up if there is an index on that field.

• If you write a join query on a field in a table, the join query will be speeded up if there is an index on that field.

• If you have requested that an index be maintained on a certain field, the system will automatically use the index for those queries where it helps.

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• Whether a query needs to access all of the records in sorted order or whether it needs to be able to find specific records that match a condition, an index can help.

• For the small tables in the example database, the difference in speed will not be noticeable.

• However, if a table had thousands or tens of thousands of records, the difference would be significant.

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• Maintaining indexes, although not visible to the user, involves a cost.

• If a table has an index on it, every time the user inserts a new record into a table, deletes a record from the table, or updates the value of the field the index is on, not only does the table have to be changed, but the index also has to be changed.

• This causes insert, update, and delete operations to run somewhat more slowly than they otherwise would.

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• Indexes also take up space. • Any one index alone would not be too costly

to maintain, but it is not practical to automatically index on ever field of every table.

• The user has to choose which indexes would be worth having, and create only those.

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• There is one last thing to consider: • If a table definition includes the specification

of a primary key field, the system will automatically create and maintain an index on that field.

• It is the index that is used in order to enforce uniqueness and the not null requirement on the field.

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• Because the values in the index are maintained in sorted order, if a user tries to enter a duplicate value, it is immediately detected when the index is updated, and the duplicate will be rejected.

• Having an index on the primary key is useful because the primary key field is the field most frequently used to access a table.

• The existence of the index is the reason that query results tend to be shown in primary key order, even if no ORDER BY was included in them.

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10.5 Syntax for Indexes

• 1. Creating indexes is not exactly the same as creating tables or specifying constraints, but indexes are related to both ideas.

• Indexes are created using the CREATE keyword, like creating a table.

• They are not created by adding a line to a table definition.

• As explained above, some constraints are actually implemented by means of indexes. The creation of an index is not specified in a table definition.

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• When creating an index you have to give it a name, tell which table it’s on, and specify which field (or fields) it’s on.

• The default sort order for the index field is ascending, but it is also possible to specify a sort order, either ASC or DESC.

• If you frequently wrote queries on a table where you requested the results in descending order, then DESC would be a desirable option.

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• Here is a simple example of the creation of an index:

• CREATE INDEX lastnameindexasc• ON Person(lastname)

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• Here is an example with a different sort order:• • CREATE INDEX lastnameindexdesc• ON Person(lastname DESC)

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• You can create the index before any data are in the table.

• You can also create it after data have already been entered.

• If you create it afterwards, if there are lots of existing records, it may take the system a noticeable amount of time to create the index.

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• Just like it’s possible to have concatenated key fields, or do ORDER BY on more than one field at a time, it is possible to have an index on more than one field.

• If you had a city and state field in the Person table and frequently ran queries containing ORDER BY state, city, this might be a useful index to have:

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• CREATE INDEX statecityindex• ON Person(state, city)

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• 2. As already pointed out, the system automatically creates an index for the primary key field because the index can be used to enforce uniqueness and the not null requirement.

• When specifying the uniqueness and not null constraints separately, this also causes the creation of an index.

• If the user is creating an index anyway, it is also possible to specify these constraints as part of the index rather than specifying them separately.

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• For example, you could create an index on a person’s lastname and enforce uniqueness at the same time in this way:

• CREATE UNIQUE INDEX uniquelastnameindex• ON Person(lastname)

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• If you wanted to prevent null values for lastname, you could do this:

• • CREATE INDEX notnulllastnameindex• ON Person(lastname)• WITH DISALLOW NULL

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• Not all of this syntax is guaranteed to work in Microsoft Access SQL, but the general specification of an index can be shown using special notation.

• The symbols in the notation are read in this way: • [] means something that’s optional. • | means “or”, that is something where you can

choose from a list. • {} encloses a list to choose from.

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• As you can see, the complete syntax allows you to specify an index that may or may not enforce uniqueness and the not null requirement, and it can also specify that the field being indexed on is the primary key or not.

• CREATE [UNIQUE] INDEX index_name• ON table_name(field_name(s) [ASC|DESC])• [WITH {DISALLOW NULL | IGNORE NULL |

PRIMARY}]

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The End