Selecting Data

Overview

Teaching: 10 min
Exercises: 5 min

Questions

• How can I get data from a database?

Objectives

• Introduce SQLite usage.

• Write a query to select all values for specific fields from a single table.

Antartic Survey data

The examples through this tutorial make use an Antartic Survey dataset:

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, William Dyer, Frank Pabodie, and Valentina Roerich led expeditions to the Pole of Inaccessibility in the South Pacific, and then onward to Antarctica. Two years ago, their expeditions were found in a storage locker at Miskatonic University. We have scanned and OCR the data they contain, and we now want to store that information in a way that will make search and analysis easy.

The data, stored in an SQLite file named survey.db, has the following tables and relationships:

SQLite and survey.db

Getting Into and Out Of SQLite

In order to use the SQLite commands interactively, we need to enter into the SQLite console. So, open up a terminal, and run

$ cd /path/to/survey/data/
$ sqlite3 survey.db

The SQLite command is sqlite3 and you are telling SQLite to open up the survey.db. You need to specify the .db file otherwise, SQLite will open up a temporary, empty database.

To get out of SQLite, type out .exit or .quit. For some terminals, Ctrl-D can also work. If you forget any SQLite . (dot) command, type .help.

Before we get into using SQLite to select the data, let’s take a look at the tables of the database we will use in our examples:

Notice that three entries — one in the Visit table, and two in the Survey table — don’t contain any actual data, but instead have a special -null- entry: we’ll return to these missing values later.

Checking If Data is Available

On the shell command line, change the working directory to the one where you saved survey.db.

$ cd sql-tutorial
$ ls survey.db

survey.db

If you get the same output, you’re in place to run

$ sqlite3 survey.db

SQLite version 3.8.8 2015-01-16 12:08:06
Enter ".help" for usage hints.
sqlite>

that instructs SQLite to load the database in the survey.db file.

For a list of useful system commands, enter .help.

All SQLite-specific commands are prefixed with a . to distinguish them from SQL commands.

Type .tables to list the tables in the database.

.tables

Person   Site     Survey   Visit

If you didn’t have the above tables, you might be curious what information was stored in each table. To get more information on the tables, type .schema to see the SQL statements used to create the tables in the database. The statements will have a list of the columns and the data types each column stores.

.schema

CREATE TABLE Person (id TEXT PRIMARY KEY, personal TEXT, family TEXT);
CREATE TABLE Site (name TEXT PRIMARY KEY, lat REAL, long REAL);
CREATE TABLE Visit (id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, site TEXT, dated TEXT, 
FOREIGN KEY (site) REFERENCES Site(name));
CREATE TABLE Survey (taken INTEGER, person TEXT, quant TEXT, reading REAL, 
FOREIGN KEY (taken) REFERENCES Visit(id), FOREIGN KEY (person) REFERENCES Person(id));

The output is formatted as <columnName dataType>. Thus we can see from the first line that the table Person has three columns:

• id with type text
• personal with type text
• family with type text

Note: The available data types vary based on the database manager - you can search online for what data types are supported.

You can change some SQLite settings to make the output easier to read. First, set the output mode to display left-aligned columns. Then turn on the display of column headers.

.mode column
.header on

To exit SQLite and return to the shell command line, you can use either .quit or .exit.

Selecting (querying) data

For now, let’s write an SQL query that displays scientists’ names. We do this using the SQL command SELECT, giving it the names of the columns we want and the table we want them from. Our query and its output look like this:

SELECT family, personal FROM Person;

The semicolon at the end of the query tells the database manager that the query is complete and ready to run. We have written our commands in upper case and the names for the table and columns in lower case, but we don’t have to: as the example below shows, SQL is case insensitive.

SeLeCt FaMiLy, PeRsOnAl FrOm PeRsOn;

You can use SQL’s case insensitivity to your advantage. For instance, some people choose to write SQL keywords (such as SELECT and FROM) in capital letters and field and table names in lower case. This can make it easier to locate parts of an SQL statement. For instance, you can scan the statement, quickly locate the prominent FROM keyword and know the table name follows. Whatever casing convention you choose, please be consistent: complex queries are hard enough to read without the extra cognitive load of random capitalization. One convention is to use UPPER CASE for SQL statements, to distinguish them from tables and column names. This is the convention that we will use for this lesson.

While we are on the topic of SQL’s syntax, one aspect of SQL’s syntax that can frustrate novices and experts alike is forgetting to finish a command with ; (semicolon). When you press enter for a command without adding the ; to the end, it can look something like this:

SELECT id FROM Person
...>
...>

This is SQL’s prompt, where it is waiting for additional commands or for a ; to let SQL know to finish. This is easy to fix! Just type ; and press enter!

Now, going back to our query, it’s important to understand that the rows and columns in a database table aren’t actually stored in any particular order. They will always be displayed in some order, but we can control that in various ways. For example, we could swap the columns in the output by writing our query as:

SELECT personal, family FROM Person;

or even repeat columns:

SELECT id, id, id FROM Person;

As a shortcut, we can select all of the columns in a table using *:

SELECT * FROM Person;

Understanding CREATE statements

Use the .schema to identify column that contains integers.

Solution

.schema

CREATE TABLE Person (id TEXT PRIMARY KEY, personal TEXT, family TEXT);
CREATE TABLE Site (name TEXT PRIMARY KEY, lat REAL, long REAL);
CREATE TABLE Visit (id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, site TEXT, dated TEXT, 
FOREIGN KEY (site) REFERENCES Site(name));
CREATE TABLE Survey (taken INTEGER, person TEXT, quant TEXT, reading REAL, 
FOREIGN KEY (taken) REFERENCES Visit(id), FOREIGN KEY (person) REFERENCES Person(id));

From the output, we see that the taken column in the Survey table (3rd line) is composed of integers.

Selecting Site Names

Write a query that selects only the name column from the Site table.

Solution

SELECT name FROM Site;

name
DR-1
DR-3
MSK-4

Query Style

Many people format queries as:

SELECT personal, family FROM person;

or as:

select Personal, Family from PERSON;

What style do you find easiest to read, and why?

Key Points

• Use SELECT… FROM… to get values from a database table.

• SQL is case-insensitive (but data is case-sensitive).