Chapter 3. Creating, Populating, Altering, and Deleting Tables

In the SQL Server database, data is stored in tables (also known as relations in relational database theory). In Chapter 2, we discussed how to write queries to retrieve data from existing tables by using the SELECT statement. In this chapter, we will discuss how to create tables and insert data into them, and how to alter, update, and delete tables and their data using SQL. We start the chapter with a discussion of data types . You need to know the different data types before you can use the CREATE TABLE command to create tables. In the CREATE TABLE command, in addition to the column names, the data types and sizes of the columns have to be included.