Home and Learn: Intermediate Programming

Creating the First Sql Server Database Table

We created the database in our previous lesson. In this lesson, we'll create the first table, which is going to hold alist of students.

In the Server Explorer on the left, right-click on Tables and select Add New Table from the menu:

Adding a New Table to the Sql Server database

When you click on Add New Table, the Table Designer will open up in the middle of Visual Studio. It should look like this:

The Sql Seerver Table Designer in Visual Studio showing a Primary Key and an ID field

Our Students table will contain an ID column, a Family Name column, and a Given Name column. The second table we'll create will link the two tables via the ID column. You'll see how this works in a moment. For now, let's add the columns to this table.

Click in the Id column, under Name. Notice the key symbol just to the left of it. This means that the Id column is the Primary Key, which is what we want. A Primary Key, remember, is one that uniquely identifies a row in the table. So you can't have two rows in the table with the same Id.

But change the Id column to StudentID. Keep the type on int and Allow Nulls should be left unchecked.

Click under the StudentID name and enter FamilyName as a new Column. Set its Data Type to NVARCHAR(50). Allow Nulls. Create a third Column. Set the Name to GivenName and the Data Type to NVARCHAR(50) again. Check Allow Nulls. Your Table Designer should look like this:

The Sql Seerver Table Designer showing three columns set up and the Table name highlighted

Notice the bottom half of the Table Designer, where it says CREATE TABLE. This is T-SQL. The table name has a default name of [dbo].[TABLE] (the one highlighted). Change Table to Students. This will be the name of our first table:

Renaming the database Table from the default to Students

Once you've changed the name of the table, click the Update button in the top left:

The Sql Seerver Table Designer showing the Update button highlighted

When you click Update, you should see a dialog box appear. This one:

Previewing the Updates before commiting them to the database

Click the Update Database button.

Now that we have one table set up, let's do the other one. We're going to set up a relation between the two tables, with the help of a Foreign Key. We'll do that in the next lesson below.

Create a Second table with a Foreign Key >>

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