SQL Library Lab

We're going to build a SQL database that will keep track of books from a fantasy series in a library. These types of books can get complex, with many characters that span many books in a series, or just appear in one book, and characters that are species other than human. We will have tables for: Characters, Books, Series, Authors, and Sub-Genres. For a refresher on SQL syntax as you work through this lab, the W3Schools SQL Tutorial is a helpful reference, as well as the resources listed below.

Objectives

• Become comfortable writing SQL statements to create tables that have complex relations with each other

• Understand and implement JOINs to write complex SELECT statements to query a database

Section 1: schema.sql

Build out the schema for our Fantasy Library database:

1. All tables must have a PRIMARY KEY on the id

2. The Series table should have a title and belong to an author and a sub-genre

3. The Sub-Genres table has a name

4. The Authors table has a name

5. The Books table has a title and year and belong to a series

6. The Characters table has a name, motto, and species and belong to an author

7. The Books table has many characters and characters are in many books in a series. How do we accomplish this complex association? With a join table between Characters and Books. This join table (let's call it character_books) will just have -in addition to its primary key- two foreign key columns for the character and book ids. Each row in this join table acts as a relation between a book and a character.

Section 2: insert.sql

Populate the database with the following:

• 2 series

• 2 sub-genres

• 2 authors

• 3 books in each series

• 8 characters

  • 4 characters in each series

    • of each of those 4, make 2 in all of the books in a series, and 2 in just 1 book in a series

• Note you will need to insert values into your character_books join table

• Feel free to make these up if you don't know any Fantasy series :)

Section 3: update.sql

Update the species of the last character in the database to "Martian" by writing an update statement in update.sql.

Section 4: Querying your database

In lib/querying.rb, complete the tests by writing the appropriate queries to satisfy the queries. Note that for this section, the database will be seeded with external data so don't expect it to reflect the data you added above.

Resources

• W3Schools SQL Tutorial
• Seldom Blog - About SQL Joins: The 3 Ring Binder Model
• Coding Horror - A Visual Explanation of SQL Joins
• Geeky is Awesome - SQL Joins Tutorial

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