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Fourth Edition

Ben Forta

800 East 96th Street, Indianapolis, Indiana 46240

Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes, Fourth Edition

Copyright 2013 by Pearson Education, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book shall be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. No patent liability is assumed with respect to the use of the information contained herein. Although every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and author assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. Nor is any liability assumed for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

ISBN-13: 9780672336072

ISBN-10: 0672336073

Library of Congress cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file.

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing: October 2012

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Ben Forta is Adobe Systems Director of Developer Relations and has more than 20 years of experience in the computer industry in product development, support, training, and product marketing. He is the author of the best-selling Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes, spinoff titles on MySQL and SQL Server T-SQL, ColdFusion Web Application Construction Kit and Advanced ColdFusion Application Development (both published by Adobe Press), Sams Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes, as well as books on Flash, Java, Windows, and other subjects. He has extensive experience in database design and development, has implemented databases for several highly successful commercial software programs and websites, and is a frequent lecturer and columnist on Internet and database technologies. Ben lives in Oak Park, Michigan, with his wife Marcy and their seven children. Ben welcomes your e-mail at .

Thanks to the team at Sams for all these years of support, dedication, and encouragement. A special thank-you to Mark Taber for encouraging this long awaited update and for suggesting and facilitating the code coloring, which significantly enhances the readability and value of this new edition.

Thanks to my colleague Greg Wilson for his thorough technical review.

Thanks to the many hundreds of you who provided feedback on the first three editions of this book. Fortunately, most of it was positive, and all of it was appreciated. The enhancements and changes in this edition are a direct response to your feedback, which I continue to welcome.

Thanks to the dozens of colleges and universities who have made this book part of their IT and computer science curriculums. Being included and trusted by professors and teachers this way is immensely rewarding and equally humbling.

And finally, thanks to the more than one-quarter million of you who bought the previous editions of this book, making it not just my best-selling title, but also one of the best-selling books on the subject. Your continued support is the highest compliment an author can ever be paid.

Ben Forta

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SQL is the most widely used database language. Whether you are an application developer, database administrator, web application designer, mobile app developer, or Microsoft Office user, a good working knowledge of SQL is an important part of interacting with databases.

This book was born out of necessity. I had been teaching Web application development for several years, and students were constantly asking for SQL book recommendations. There are lots of SQL books out there. Some are actually very good. But they all have one thing in common: for most users they teach just too much information. Instead of teaching SQL itself, most books teach everything from database design and normalization to relational database theory and administrative concerns. And while those are all important topics, they are not of interest to most of us who just need to learn SQL.

And so, not finding a single book that I felt comfortable recommending, I turned that classroom experience into the book you are holding. Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes will teach you SQL you need to know, starting with simple data retrieval and working on to more complex topics including the use of joins, subqueries, stored procedures, cursors, triggers, and table constraints. Youll learn methodically, systematically, and simplyin lessons that will each take 10 minutes or less to complete.

Now in its fourth edition, this book has taught SQL to over a quarter million English speaking users, and has been translated into over a dozen other languages too so as to help users the globe over. And now it is your turn. So turn to , and get to work. Youll be writing world class SQL in no time at all.