Introduction

The vast majority of companies today work with large amounts of data. This could be product information, customer data, client details, employee data, and so on. Most people who are new to working with data will do so using spreadsheets. Software such as Microsoft Excel has many tools for manipulating and analyzing data, but as the volume and complexity of the data you're working with increases, these tools may become inefficient.

A more powerful and controlled way of working with data is to store it in a database and use SQL to access and manipulate it. SQL works extremely well for organized data and can be used very effectively to insert, retrieve, and manipulate data with just a few lines of code. In this chapter, we'll get an introduction to SQL and see how to create databases and tables, as well as how to insert values into them.