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

Chapter 3: The Foundation Statements of T-SQL
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Which returns the following:
StoreCode Name Address City State Zip
---------- ------------ --------------------- ------- --------- ----
TEST Test Store 1234 Anywhere Street Here NY 00319
Let’s update the value in the City column:
UPDATE Stores
SET City = ‘There’
WHERE StoreCode = ‘TEST’;
Much like when we ran the INSERT statement, we don’t get much back from SQL Server:
(1 row(s) affected)
Yet when we run our SELECT statement again, we see that the value has indeed changed:
StoreCode Name Address City State Zip
---------- ------------ --------------------- ------- --------- ----
TEST Test Store 1234 Anywhere Street There NY 00319
Note that we could have changed more than one column just by adding a comma and the additional
column expression. For example, the following statement would have updated both columns:
UPDATE Stores
SET city = ‘There’, state = ‘NY’
WHERE StoreCode = ‘TEST’;
If we choose, we can use an expression for the SET clause instead of the explicit values we’ve used thus
far. For example, we could add a suffix on all of the store names by concatenating the existing store
name with a suffix:
UPDATE Stores
SET Name = Name + ‘ - ‘ + StoreCode;
After executing that UPDATE, run a SELECT statement on Stores:
SELECT *
FROM Stores
You should see the Name suffixed by the StoreCode:
StoreCode Name Address City State Zip
---------- --------------- --------------------- ------- ------ ----
TEST Test Store - TEST 1234 Anywhere Street There NY 00319
TST2 Test Store - TST2 NULL Here NY 00319
As you can see, a single UPDATE statement can be fairly powerful. Even so, this is really just the beginning.
We’ll see even more advanced updates in later chapters.