How to INSERT rows into a TABLE

Back to: Structured Query Language (SQL)

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We have a database called myDB and it has a single table called employees. We can view the content of this table:

SELECT * FROM employees;

At the moment our table contains no records (Rows).

We can add data to our table:

INSERT INTO employees
VALUES (1, "Eugene", "Krabs", 25.50, "2025-03-03");

Lets take a look at our table now that it has a row by using the SELECT * FROM employees; statement:

Note: the date is in the format “YYYY-MM-DD”.

It can be tedious adding data one row at a time, we can add multiple rows:

INSERT INTO employees
VALUES  (2, "Squidward", "Tentacles", 15.00, "2025-01-03"), 
	(3, "Spongebob", "Squarepants", 12.50, "2025-01-04"), 
	(4, "Patrick", "Star", 12.50, "2025-01-05"), 
	(5, "Sandy", "Cheeks", 17.25, "2025-01-06");

Again we can take a look at our table with its added rows by using the SELECT * FROM employees; statement:

To finish, we can add partial data if we don’t have information for each column. To do this we must specify which columns we are adding data to:

INSERT INTO employees (employee_id, first_name, last_name)
VALUES  (6, "Sheldon", "Plankton");

Using the SELECT * FROM employees; statement:

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