SQL Refresher

Learning Goals

Review SQL concepts from intermission work
Practice writing SQL queries in a familiar database

Warmup

How do you determine which columns will be returned from a SQL query?
What else do you remember from your SQL prework?

Lesson

Setup

This activity relies on a pre-created database. Make sure you have created and seeded the database from your little-shop-redux. If you do not have a little-shop-redux, you can pull down a completed version here.

Enter psql from your terminal. This should drop you into an interactive postgres session where you can run SQL commands from the terminal.

Note: If you get an error that says something like Database username "YOUR_NAME" does not exist. you will need to create a database that shares the username. Run createdb "YOUR_NAME" and re-run psql.

The first thing you will see is a helpful note to enter help if you need some more information about how to use this interactive session. \? will provide you with some terminal specific commands, while \h will provide you with a list of SQL commands that offer additional documentation.

In order to interact with our LittleShop database, we’ll first need to connect to it. How do we know it exists or what it’s named? First type \list. This will provide you with a list of databases available to you.

In order to connect to our database, type \c little-shop-development (or whatever \list tells you your database is called). Now you should be able to run SQL commands.

When you’re ready to disconnect type \q

Practice

With a partner, see if you can complete each of the tasks below. After each section we will check in as a group.

SELECT FROM LIMIT

All of the information on the merchants table.
id, merchant_id, and description of five items.

WHERE

Items that have a merchant with an id of 12334284.
Items that have a price of 800.
id, price, and description for items more expensive than 800.

Aggregate Functions

(Complete these without using Order)

Max, and min price from the items table.
Average price for all items.
Id, merchant id, and description of the most expensive item.
Id, merchant id, and description of the least expensive item.
Count of items created after 1993-09-29.
All information about the oldest Merchant.
All information about the newest Merchant.

JOIN

Highest items price for merchant with id of 12334284.
Average items price for merchant with id of 12334284.

GROUP

Count of items for each merchant.
Total price of all items for each merchant.
Total income for each merchant.

ORDER

Name of the merchant with the most items.
Top five merchants with the most invoices.
Top 10 most expensive items.
Least prolific merchant (by item count).
name for the five merchants with the most items.

Extensions

Total of each invoice for each merchant.
Merchant ID and Invoice ID for the top 5 least expensive invoices.
Merchant ID and Invoice ID for the top 5 most expensive invoices.

Additional Resources

Fundamental SQL (review from intermission work)
Intermediate SQL