Beginning Microsoft SQL Server 2008 ... - S3 Tech Training

Chapter 3: The Foundation Statements of T-SQL
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Which returns (among other things):
Column_name Type Computed Length Prec Scale Nullable
----------------------- ----------- ----------- ----------- ----- ----- --------
OrderNumber varchar no 20 no
StoreCode char no 4 no
OrderDate date no 3 10 0 no
Quantity int no 4 10 0 no
Terms varchar no 12 no
TitleID int no 4 10 0 no
The Sales table has six columns in it, but pay particular attention to the Quantity, OrderDate, and
TitleID columns; they are of types that we haven’t done INSERTs with up to this point.
What you need to pay attention to in this query is how to format the types as you’re inserting them. We
do not use quotes for numeric values as we have with our character data. However, the date data type
does require quotes. (Essentially, it goes in as a string and it then gets converted to a date.)
INSERT INTO Sales
(StoreCode, OrderNumber, OrderDate, Quantity, Terms, TitleID)
VALUES
(‘TEST’, ‘TESTORDER’, ‘01/01/1999’, 10, ‘NET 30’, 1234567);
This gets back the now familiar (1 row(s) affected) message. Notice, however, that I moved around
the column order in my insert. The data in the VALUES portion of the insert needs to match the column
list, but the column list can be in any order you choose to make it; it does not have to be in the order the
columns are listed in the physical table.
Note that while I’ve used the MM/DD/YYYY format that is popular in the U.S., you
can use a wide variety of other formats (such as the internationally more popular
YYYY-MM-DD) with equal success. The default for your server will vary depending
on whether you purchase a localized copy of SQL Server or if the setting has been
changed on the server.
Multirow Inserts
New with SQL Server 2008 is the ability to INSERT multiple rows at one time. To do this, just keep tacking
on additional comma-delimited insertion values, for example:
INSERT INTO Sales
(StoreCode, OrderNumber, OrderDate, Quantity, Terms, TitleID)
VALUES
(‘TST2’, ‘TESTORDER2’, ‘01/01/1999’, 10, ‘NET 30’, 1234567),
(‘TST2’, ‘TESTORDER3’, ‘02/01/1999’, 10, ‘NET 30’, 1234567);
This inserts both sets of values using a single statement. To check what we got, let’s go ahead and look in
the Sales table:
SELECT *
FROM Sales;