2.3. Creating a New Table | ||||
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2.3. Creating a New Table#
You can create a new table by specifying the table name, along with all column names and their types:
CREATE TABLE weather ( city varchar(80), temp_lo int, -- low temperature temp_hi int, -- high temperature prcp real, -- precipitation date date);
You can enter this intopsql
with the line breaks.psql
will recognize that the command is not terminated until the semicolon.
White space (i.e., spaces, tabs, and newlines) can be used freely in SQL commands. That means you can type the command aligned differently than above, or even all on one line. Two dashes (“--
”) introduce comments. Whatever follows them is ignored up to the end of the line. SQL is case-insensitive about key words and identifiers, except when identifiers are double-quoted to preserve the case (not done above).
varchar(80)
specifies a data type that can store arbitrary character strings up to 80 characters in length.int
is the normal integer type.real
is a type for storing single precision floating-point numbers.date
should be self-explanatory. (Yes, the column of typedate
is also nameddate
. This might be convenient or confusing — you choose.)
PostgreSQL supports the standardSQL types The second example will store cities and their associated geographical location: The Finally, it should be mentioned that if you don't need a table any longer or want to recreate it differently you can remove it using the following command:int
,smallint
,real
,double precision
,char(
,N
)varchar(
,N
)date
,time
,timestamp
, andinterval
, as well as other types of general utility and a rich set of geometric types.PostgreSQL can be customized with an arbitrary number of user-defined data types. Consequently, type names are not key words in the syntax, except where required to support special cases in theSQL standard.CREATE TABLE cities ( name varchar(80), location point);
point
type is an example of aPostgreSQL-specific data type.DROP TABLE
tablename
;