18.3. Relational Database Overview: A books Database

We now overview relational databases in the context of a sample books database we created for this chapter. Before we discuss SQL, we discuss the tables of the books database. We use this database to introduce various database concepts, including how to use SQL to obtain information from the database and to manipulate the data. We provide a script to create the database. You can find the script in the examples directory for this chapter. Section 18.5.2 explains how to use this script. The database consists of three tables: Authors, AuthorISBN and Titles.

Authors Table

The Authors table (described in Fig. 18.3) consists of three columns that maintain each author’s unique ID number, first name and last name. Figure 18.4 contains sample data from the Authors table of the books database.