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And then we moved on to a more specific start (indeed, it’s the first line of our statement that will create
the table) on creating a table called Customers:
CREATE TABLE Customers
Our Customers table is going to be the first table in a database we will be putting together to track our
company’s accounting. We’ll be looking at designing a database in a couple of chapters, but we’ll go
ahead and get started on our database by building a couple of tables to learn our CREATE TABLE statement.
We’ll look at most of the concepts of table construction in this section, but we’ll save a few for later
on in the book. That being said, let’s get started building the first of several tables.
I’m going to add in a USE line prior to my CREATE code so that I’m sure that, when I
run the script, the table is created in the proper database. We’ll then follow up that first line that we’ve
already seen with a few columns.
Any script you create for regular use with a particular database should include a USE command with
the name of that database. This ensures that you really are creating, altering, and dropping the objects
in the database you intend. More than once have I been the victim of my own stupidity when I blindly
opened up a script and executed it only to find that the wrong database was current, and any tables
with the same name had been dropped (thus losing all data) and replaced by a new layout. You can also
tell when other people have done this by taking a look around the master database — you’ll often find
several extraneous tables in that database from people running CREATE scripts that were meant to go
somewhere else.
USE Accounting
CREATE TABLE Customers
(
CustomerNo int IDENTITY NOT NULL,
CustomerName varchar(30) NOT NULL,
Address1 varchar(30) NOT NULL,
Address2 varchar(30) NOT NULL,
City varchar(20) NOT NULL,
State char(2) NOT NULL,
Zip varchar(10) NOT NULL,
Contact varchar(25) NOT NULL,
Phone char(15) NOT NULL,
FedIDNo varchar(9) NOT NULL,
DateInSystem smalldatetime NOT NULL
)
This is a somewhat simplified table vs. what we would probably use in real life, but there’s plenty of
time to change it later (and we will).
Once we’ve built the table, we want to verify that it was indeed created, and that it has all the columns
and types that we expect. To do this, we can make use of several commands, but perhaps the best is one
that will seem like an old friend before you’re done with this book: sp_help. The syntax is simple:
EXEC sp_help
To specify the table object that we just created, try executing the following code:
EXEC sp_help Customers
Chapter 5: Creating and Altering Tables
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