Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 24 Hours

By Ron Plew and Ryan Stephens

• Table of Contents
  • Copyright
  • About the Authors
  • Acknowledgments
  • Tell Us What You Think!
  • Introduction
  • Part I: A SQL Concepts Overview
  • Hour 1. Welcome to the World of SQL
  • Part II: Building Your Database
  • Hour 2. Defining Data Structures
  • Hour 3. Managing Database Objects
    • What Are Database Objects?
    • What Is a Schema?
    • A Table: The Primary Storage for Data
    • Integrity Constraints
    • Summary
    • Q&A
    • Workshop
  • Hour 4. The Normalization Process
  • Hour 5. Manipulating Data
  • Hour 6. Managing Database Transactions
  • Part III: Getting Effective Results from Queries
  • Hour 7. Introduction to the Database Query
  • Hour 8. Using Operators to Categorize Data
  • Hour 9. Summarizing Data Results from a Query
  • Hour 10. Sorting and Grouping Data
  • Hour 11. Restructuring the Appearance of Data
  • Hour 12. Understanding Dates and Times
  • Part IV: Building Sophisticated Database Queries
  • Hour 13. Joining Tables in Queries
  • Hour 14. Using Subqueries to Define Unknown Data
  • Hour 15. Combining Multiple Queries into One
  • Part V: SQL Performance Tuning
  • Hour 16. Using Indexes to Improve Performance
  • Hour 17. Improving Database Performance
  • Part VI: Using SQL to Manage Users and Security
  • Hour 18. Managing Database Users
  • Hour 19. Managing Database Security
  • Part VII: Summarized Data Structures
  • Hour 20. Creating and Using Views and Synonyms
  • Hour 21. Working with the System Catalog
  • Part VIII: Applying SQL Fundamentals in Today's World
  • Hour 22. Advanced SQL Topics
  • Hour 23. Extending SQL to the Enterprise, the Internet, and the Intranet
  • Hour 24. Extensions to Standard SQL
  • Part IX: Appendixes
  • Appendix A. Common SQL Commands
  • Appendix B. Using MySQL for Exercises
  • Appendix C. Answers to Quizzes and Exercises
  • Appendix D. CREATE TABLE Statements for Book Examples
  • Appendix E. INSERT Statements for Data in Book Examples
  • Appendix F. Glossary
  • Appendix G. Bonus Exercises

What Is a Schema?

A schema is a collection of database objects (as far as this hour is concerned—tables) associated with one particular database username. This username is called the schema owner, or the owner of the related group of objects. You may have one or multiple schemas in a database. Basically, any user who creates an object has just created his or her own schema. So, based on a user's privileges within the database, the user has control over objects that are created, manipulated, and deleted. A schema can consist of a single table and has no limits to the number of objects that it may contain, unless restricted by a specific database implementation.

Say you have been issued a database username and password by the database administrator. Your username is USER1. Suppose you log on to the database and then create a table called EMPLOYEE_TBL. According to the database, your table's actual name is USER1.EMPLOYEE_TBL. The schema name for that table is USER1, which is also the owner of that table. You have just created the first table of a schema.

The good thing about schemas is that when you access a table that you own (in your own schema), you do not have to refer to the schema name. For instance, you could refer to your table as either one of the following:

EMPLOYEE_TBL 
USER1.EMPLOYEE_TBL

The first option is preferred because it requires fewer keystrokes. If another user were to query one of your tables, the user would have to specify the schema, as follows:

USER1.EMPLOYEE_TBL 

In Hour 20, "Creating and Using Views and Synonyms," you learn about the distribution of permissions so that other users can access your tables. You also learn about synonyms, which allow you to give a table another name so you do not have to specify the schema name when accessing a table. Figure 3.1 illustrates two schemas in a relational database.

Figure 3.1 Schemas in a database.

There are, in Figure 3.1, two user accounts in the database that own tables: USER1 and USER2. Each user account has its own schema. Some examples for how the two users can access their own tables and tables owned by the other user follow:

In this example, both users have a table called TEST. Tables can have the same names in a database as long as they belong to different schemas. If you look at it this way, table names are always unique in a database because the schema owner is actually part of the table name. For instance, USER1.TEST is a different table than USER2.TEST. If you do not specify a schema with the table name when accessing tables in a database, the database server looks for a table that you own by default. That is, if USER1 tries to access TEST, the database server looks for a USER1-owned table named TEST before it looks for other objects owned by USER1, such as synonyms to tables in another schema. Hour 21, "Working with the System Catalog," helps you fully understand how synonyms work.

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