It’s very difficult explaining to students new to relational databases how SQL works. There are many parts that seem intuitive and then there are others that confuse and confound.
For beginners, the idea that a SQL statement is simply a text string that you must dispatch to a SQL statement processing engine is new. That’s because they use an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that hides, or abstracts the complexity, of how SQL executes.
I start my core SQL class by demonstrating how to run a text literal query without a FROM clause in MySQL Workbench, like this:
SELECT 'Hello World!' AS "Output";
After writing the query, I highlight everything except the semicolon and click the lightening bolt that dispatches the static string to the SQL statement engine. They see this result:
Then, I launch a mysql Monitor session and write the query with a semicolon to dispatch the SQL …
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