For this tutorial, I will be using MySQL as the database management system and the MySQL Query Browser to communicate with it. A Graphical User Interface (GUI) like this can of course, be used to edit databases without writing an SQL, but for more advanced applications of SQL, this tool wouldn't be enough. Instead, it's more common that we would embed SQL inside programming languages such as C# or Java or inside Server-side scripting languages such as ASP or PHP.
The SQL statements use a very English-like syntax and is meant to be easy to use and understand. The statements are not case-sensitive. I will be writing SQL keywords with capital letters and names with lower-case letters. The standard way to separate the SQL statements is using semicolon (;). Some database systems also require it to end the statement, but the Query Browser does not. Whitespace characters are generally ignored in SQL, so we can format the code any way we want. For single line comments, SQL uses double dash (--). Some extensions like MySQL also support C-style multiline comments.
