Mac Forum / Applications / Mac Applications / May 2007

AES,

Hard to beat NeoOffice or OO.o.  You can mess around all day with data
tables, queries, merges, da works.  However, to answer your question in a
couple of lines rather than the detailed couple of pages you seek - the
Web's got to be filthy with SQL tutorials - Structured Query Language is a
set of commands and a syntax for stringing them together to return the
desired information.

In it's simplest form, it can be quite easy - in fact there are SQL
booklets that are very short.  It's sort of like HTML where a small
instruction set and some simple rules of syntax can built the most complex
site you can envision:

Select a-field-name from a-table-name

will return the values found in all rows of the table for that column.

You can add a Where at the end and a characteristic-to-look-for and only
things matching that will be returned in the dataset.

You can add an Order By at the end and a field-to-sort-by, and even an ASC
or DSC to sort the results ascending or descending by the specified field.

You can use * in place of the a-field-name in the first example to return
all columns.

And...so much more.  However, it's well organized and intuitive, once
you have a list of commands in front of you, and can be put right to work
in short order.

Finally, it's also easy to put this stuff in a Web page to support keeping
page data in a database, structure in the Web page, and style formatting
in a .css file.  All you need is PHP and, again, a basic knowledge of the
commands and syntax.

Anyone who has looked at C and not lost consciousness can get up to speed
on this quickly too.  A very small number of command lines and structures
can do a lot of work and can be used in many places over and over.

Frank

You really can't expect someone to write an essay on that... either it
will be too simple and misleading or plain wrong and anyway too cheap.
This is one of those things that are actually easy (SQL was invented to
allow any silly operator to access a database from her terminal and in
the prime days of databases this was just basic knowledge like
touch-typing) but in practice suffers from many vendor-specific
additions. And database design *can* be a challenge. But keep in mind
that the basic idea is still the same old simple thing: Have a standard
language to express queries to a database. Most things are *very*
straight and easy with SQL.

CocoaMySql is a nice frontend to MySQL, which is a database server (a
quite standard one) you have to install. Another way to learn SQL basics
is SQLite, which comes installed with OS X. You can use the sqlite3
utility in the terminal (type "man sqlite3" in the shell) to create
databases and tables and play with them. Note though that SQL is highly
non-standard (every database comes with extensions and special features
and different ways to implement them), so you will only get a basic grip
on it and you'll have to dive into long docs to understand the features
and additions of particular database software. This is just boring work,
though.

What kind of engine does it use? How do you access it? These are the
first things you should find out.

       Jochem

Depending on which version of Mac OS X you're running, you could do
worse than open a Terminal window and type 'man sqlite3'. It's official
on Tiger, but present on previous versions.

SQLite is an open-source, cross-platform, minimal SQL database system
that is used internally by Mac OS X.

So try it out under sqlite3. Work on a backup, and do a 'sqlite3
path/to/your/database' and see if it works. On a backup. Did I mention
you should work on a backup? :-)