Inserting Data - Learning MySQL and MariaDB - page 106

The Syntax
The INSERT statementadds rows of data into a table. It can add a single row or multiple
rows at a time. The basic syntax of this SQL statement is:
INSERT INTO table [( column , …)]
VALUES ( value , …), (…), …;
The keywords INSERT INTO are followed by the name of the table and an optional list of
columns in parentheses. (Square brackets in asyntax indicate that the bracketed material is
optional.) Then comes the keyword VALUES and apair of parentheses containing a list of
values for each column. There are several deviations of the syntax, but this is the basic one.
Commas separate the column names within the first list, and the values within the second.
Let's go through some examples that will show a few of the simpler syntaxes for the
INSERT statement. Don't try to enter these on your system. These are generic examples
using INSERT to add data to nonexistent tables.
Here's a generic example of the INSERT statement with the minimum required syntax:
INSERT INTO books
VALUES ( 'The Big Sleep' , 'Raymond Chandler' , '1934' );
This example adds text to a table called books . This table happens to contain only three
columns, so we don't bother to list the columns. But because there are three columns, we
have to specify three values, which will go into the columns in the order that the columns
were defined in CREATE TABLE . So in our example, The Big Sleep will be inserted into
the first column of the table, Raymond Chandler will go into the second column, and 1934
will go into the third.
For columns that have a default value set, you can rely on the server to use that value and
omit the column from your INSERT statement. One way to do this is by entering avalue of
DEFAULT orNULL, as shown in the following example:
INSERT INTO books
VALUES ( 'The Thirty-Nine Steps' , 'John Buchan' , DEFAULT );
MySQL will use the default value for the third column. If the default value is NULL — the
usual default value if none is specified — that's what the statement will put in the column
for the row. For a column defined with AUTO_INCREMENT , the serverwill put the next
number in the sequence for that column.
Another way to use defaults is to list just the columns into which you want to enter non-de-
fault data, like so: