An Entrance Tutorial
Create the sample table
Click on this link for a SQL script that will create a sample database table named “country”:
Copy the script text to the clipboard from your browser then switch to the Entrance window. Click the SQL icon on the toolbar to make a new script and paste in the clipboard text.
If you aren’t connected to a database, click the “connect” icon on the toolbar, which is the leftmost toolbar icon.
Now click the “Run” icon, which is the green exclamation point on the toolbar. The script creates a table named “country” assuming one did not already exist, and you will see this display:
View the table you created
Notice the three tabs labeled “SQL”, “Results”, and “Charts” near the bottom of the window. Try clicking them to switch back and forth between the SQL and Results views. (Clicking “Charts” won’t do anything, because we don’t have a chart yet)
Next, find the table “country” in the explorer tree and double click it. You should see something similar to this:
You can switch back and forth between the original SQL script and the table it created by clicking on the “query1” and “country” tabs at the top of the window. You can also bring up popup menus by right-clicking (control-clicking on a Mac) on the table and explorer tree. Try that now.
Run simple queries
Now that you have a table with some data in it you can try running SQL queries.
Click the toolbar icon “SQL” to open a blank, new SQL script and enter this text:
select * from country
where name like 'Kenya';
then click the green "Run" exclamation point. You will see output from the query on the "Results" tab of the query pane.
To get back to the script tab, click the "SQL" tab near the bottom of the window. Here are a few more queries you can try in the same way:
select * from country limit 5;
select name,region from country limit 5;
select name,region from country
where name like 'B%';
select name,region from country
where name like 'B%';
select name,region from country
where name like 'B%'
order by population;
Save a query and reopen it
After creating a query, open the File menu and select "Save as...". The "Sql" folder will be selected for you. Select your query there, then close the script tab with Window | Close this tab.
Now double click the "Sql" folder in the explorer tree....and there is your script. Double click it to reopen it.
At this point, you know enough about Entrance to start experimenting with SQL scripts to see what they do with the sample data (and this is a good time to locate a book about SQL, like the MySQL Cookbook by Paul DuBois)
To continue learning about Entrance, read the tutorial "Drawing Charts". The examples in that tutorial use the same sample data as this one.
