Advanced SQL queries

By following this recipe, we will learn how to use advanced SQL statements such as INNER JOIN, COUNT, LIKE, DISTINCT, and so on.

How to do it…

You can do a lot more than just perform simple queries of SQL database:

1. First of all, we need to add a few tables to our database before we can dive into the programming part. Open up your web browser and access your phpMyAdmin. We need several tables for this example to work:

   

2. I will show you the structure of each of the tables required for this project and the dummy data inserted to the tables for testing. The first table is called branch, which is used to store the IDs and names of different branches of the dummy company:

   

3. Secondly, we have the department table, which stores the IDs and names of different departments of the dummy company, which is also linked to the branch data by the branch IDs:

   

4. Next, we also have an employee table, which stores the information of all the employees in the dummy company. This table is similar to the...