实验12: SQL
Lab 12: SQL
Due by 11:59pm on Tuesday, November 17.
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初始文件
下载 lab12.zip。 在压缩包中,你可以找到本实验问题的初始文件,以及一份 Ok 自动评分器。
Topics
Consult this section if you need a refresher on the material for this lab, or if you're having trouble running SQL or SQLite on your computer. It's okay to skip directly to the questions and refer back here should you get stuck.
SQL Basics
Creating Tables
You can create SQL tables either from scratch or from existing tables.
The following statement creates a table by specifying column names and values
without referencing another table. Each SELECT
clause specifies the values
for one row, and UNION
is used to join rows together. The AS
clauses give a
name to each column; it need not be repeated in subsequent rows after the
first.
CREATE TABLE [table_name] AS
SELECT [val1] AS [column1], [val2] AS [column2], ... UNION
SELECT [val3] , [val4] , ... UNION
SELECT [val5] , [val6] , ...;
Let's say we want to make the following table called big_game
which records
the scores for the Big Game each year. This table has three columns:
berkeley
, stanford
, and year
.

We could do so with the following CREATE TABLE
statement:
CREATE TABLE big_game AS
SELECT 30 AS berkeley, 7 AS stanford, 2002 AS year UNION
SELECT 28, 16, 2003 UNION
SELECT 17, 38, 2014;
Selecting From Tables
More commonly, we will create new tables by selecting specific columns that we
want from existing tables by using a SELECT
statement as follows:
SELECT [columns] FROM [tables] WHERE [condition] ORDER BY [columns] LIMIT [limit];
Let's break down this statement:
SELECT [columns]
tells SQL that we want to include the given columns in our output table;[columns]
is a comma-separated list of column names, and*
can be used to select all columnsFROM [table]
tells SQL that the columns we want to select are from the given table; see the joins section to see how to select from multiple tablesWHERE [condition]
filters the output table by only including rows whose values satisfy the given[condition]
, a boolean expressionORDER BY [columns]
orders the rows in the output table by the given comma-separated list of columnsLIMIT [limit]
limits the number of rows in the output table by the integer[limit]
Note: We capitalize SQL keywords purely because of style convention. It makes queries much easier to read, though they will still work if you don't capitalize keywords.
Here are some examples:
Select all of Berkeley's scores from the big_game
table, but only include
scores from years past 2002:
sqlite> SELECT berkeley FROM big_game WHERE year > 2002;
28
17
Select the scores for both schools in years that Berkeley won:
sqlite> SELECT berkeley, stanford FROM big_game WHERE berkeley > stanford;
30|7
28|16
Select the years that Stanford scored more than 15 points:
sqlite> SELECT year FROM big_game WHERE stanford > 15;
2003
2014
SQL operators
Expressions in the SELECT
, WHERE
, and ORDER BY
clauses can contain
one or more of the following operators:
- comparison operators:
=
,>
,<
,<=
,>=
,<>
or!=
("not equal") - boolean operators:
AND
,OR
- arithmetic operators:
+
,-
,*
,/
- concatenation operator:
||
Here are some examples:
Output the ratio of Berkeley's score to Stanford's score each year:
sqlite> select berkeley * 1.0 / stanford from big_game;
0.447368421052632
1.75
4.28571428571429
Output the sum of scores in years where both teams scored over 10 points:
sqlite> select berkeley + stanford from big_game where berkeley > 10 and stanford > 10;
55
44
Output a table with a single column and single row containing the value "hello world":
sqlite> SELECT "hello" || " " || "world";
hello world
Joins
To select data from multiple tables, we can use joins. There are many types
of joins, but the only one we'll worry about is the inner join. To perform
an inner join on two on more tables, simply list them all out in the FROM
clause of a SELECT
statement:
SELECT [columns] FROM [table1], [table2], ... WHERE [condition] ORDER BY [columns] LIMIT [limit];
We can select from multiple different tables or from the same table multiple times.
Let's say we have the following table that contains the names head football coaches at Cal since 2002:
CREATE TABLE coaches AS
SELECT "Jeff Tedford" AS name, 2002 as start, 2012 as end UNION
SELECT "Sonny Dykes" , 2013 , 2016 UNION
SELECT "Justin Wilcox" , 2017 , null;
When we join two or more tables, the default output is a cartesian product. For
example, if we joined big_game
with coaches
, we'd get the following:

If we want to match up each game with the coach that season, we'd have to
compare columns from the two tables in the WHERE
clause:
sqlite> SELECT * FROM big_game, coaches WHERE year >= start AND year <= end;
17|38|2014|Sonny Dykes|2013|2016
28|16|2003|Jeff Tedford|2002|2012
30|7|2002|Jeff Tedford|2002|2012
The following query outputs the coach and year for each Big Game win recorded
in big_game
:
sqlite> SELECT name, year FROM big_game, coaches
...> WHERE berkeley > stanford AND year >= start AND year <= end;
Jeff Tedford|2003
Jeff Tedford|2002
In the queries above, none of the column names are ambiguous. For example, it
is clear that the name
column comes from the coaches
table because there
isn't a column in the big_game
table with that name. However, if a column
name exists in more than one of the tables being joined, or if we join a table
with itself, we must disambiguate the column names using aliases.
For examples, let's find out what the score difference is for each team between
a game in big_game
and any previous games. Since each row in this table represents
one game, in order to compare two games we must join big_game
with itself:
sqlite> SELECT b.Berkeley - a.Berkeley, b.Stanford - a.Stanford, a.Year, b.Year
...> FROM big_game AS a, big_game AS b WHERE a.Year < b.Year;
-11|22|2003|2014
-13|21|2002|2014
-2|9|2002|2003
In the query above, we give the alias a
to the first big_game
table and the
alias b
to the second big_game
table. We can then reference columns from
each table using dot notation with the aliases, e.g. a.Berkeley
,
a.Stanford
, and a.Year
to select from the first table.
Troubleshooting
Python already comes with a built-in SQLite database engine to process SQL. However, it doesn't come with a "shell" to let you interact with it from the terminal. Because of this, until now, you have been using a simplified SQLite shell written by us. However, you may find the shell is old, buggy, or lacking in features. In that case, you may want to download and use the official SQLite executable.
If running python3 sqlite_shell.py
didn't work, you can download a precompiled sqlite directly
by following the following instructions and then use sqlite3
and ./sqlite3
instead
of python3 sqlite_shell.py
based on which is specified for your platform.
However, before proceeding, please remove (or rename) any SQLite executables
(sqlite3
, sqlite_shell.py
, and the like)
from the current folder, or they may conflict with the official one you download below.
Similarly, if you wish to switch back later,
please remove or rename the one you downloaded and restore the files you removed.
Windows
- Visit the download page linked above and navigate to the section Precompiled Binaries for Windows. Click on the link sqlite-tools-win32-x86-*.zip to download the binary.
- Unzip the file. There should be a
sqlite3.exe
file in the directory after extraction. -
Navigate to the folder containing the
sqlite3.exe
file and check that the version is at least 3.8.3:$ cd path/to/sqlite $ ./sqlite3 --version 3.12.1 2016-04-08 15:09:49 fe7d3b75fe1bde41511b323925af8ae1b910bc4d
macOS Yosemite (10.10) or newer
SQLite comes pre-installed. Check that you have a version that's greater than 3.8.3:
$ sqlite3
SQLite version 3.8.10.2
Mac OS X Mavericks (10.9) or older
SQLite comes pre-installed, but it is the wrong version.
- Visit the download page linked above and navigate to the section Precompiled Binaries for Mac OS X (x86). Click on the link sqlite-tools-osx-x86-*.zip to download the binary.
- Unzip the file. There should be a
sqlite3
file in the directory after extraction. -
Navigate to the folder containing the
sqlite3
file and check that the version is at least 3.8.3:$ cd path/to/sqlite $ ./sqlite3 --version 3.12.1 2016-04-08 15:09:49 fe7d3b75fe1bde41511b323925af8ae1b910bc4d
Ubuntu
The easiest way to use SQLite on Ubuntu is to install it straight from the native repositories (the version will be slightly behind the most recent release):
$ sudo apt install sqlite3
$ sqlite3 --version
3.8.6 2014-08-15 11:46:33 9491ba7d738528f168657adb43a198238abde19e
Usage
First, check that a file named sqlite_shell.py
exists alongside the assignment files.
If you don't see it, or if you encounter problems with it, scroll down to the Troubleshooting
section to see how to download an official precompiled SQLite binary before proceeding.
You can start an interactive SQLite session in your Terminal or Git Bash with the following command:
python3 sqlite_shell.py
While the interpreter is running, you can type .help
to see some of the
commands you can run.
To exit out of the SQLite interpreter, type .exit
or .quit
or press
Ctrl-C
. Remember that if you see ...>
after pressing enter, you probably
forgot a ;
.
You can also run all the statements in a .sql
file by doing the following:
-
Runs your code and then exits SQLite immediately afterwards.
python3 sqlite_shell.py < lab12.sql
-
Runs your code and then opens an interactive SQLite session, which is similar to running Python code with the interactive
-i
flag.python3 sqlite_shell.py --init lab12.sql
The Survey Data!
On Tuesday, we asked you and your fellow students to complete a brief online survey through Google Forms, which involved relatively random but fun questions. In this lab, we will interact with the results of the survey by using SQL queries to see if we can find interesting things in the data.
First, take a look at data.sql
and examine the table defined in it. Note
its structure. You will be working with:
-
students
: The main results of the survey. Each column represents a different question from the survey, except for the first column, which is the time of when the result was submitted. This time is a unique identifier for each of the rows in the table.Column Name Question time
The unique timestamp that identifies the submission number
What's your favorite number between 1 and 100? color
What is your favorite color? seven
Choose the number 7 below.
Options:
- 7
- Choose this option instead
- seven
- the number 7 below.
- I find this question condescending
song
If you could listen to only one of these songs for the rest of your life, which would it be?
Options:
- "Everytime we Touch" by Cascada
- "The Middle" by Zedd
- "Clair de Lune" by Claude Debussy
- "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana
- "Dancing Queen" by ABBA
- "All I Want for Christmas is you" by Mariah Carey
- "Down With The Sickness" by Disturbed
- "thank u, next" by Ariana Grande << /ul>
date
Pick a day of the year! pet
If you could have any animal in the world as a pet, what would it be? instructor
Choose your favorite photo of John DeNero (Options shown under Question 3) smallest
Try to guess the smallest unique positive INTEGER that anyone will put! numbers
: The results from the survey in which students could select more than one option from the numbers listed, which ranged from 0 to 10 and included 2018, 9000, and 9001. Each row has a time (which is again a unique identifier) and has the value'True'
if the student selected the column or'False'
if the student did not. The column names in this table are the following strings, referring to each possible number:'0'
,'1'
,'2'
,'4'
,'5'
,'6'
,'7'
,'8'
,'9'
,'10'
,'2018'
,'9000'
,'9001'
.
Since the survey was anonymous, we used the timestamp that a survey was
submitted as a unique identifier. A time in students
matches up with a time
in numbers
. For example, a row in students
whose time
value is
"2019/08/06 4:19:18 PM CDT"
matches up with the row in numbers
whose
time
value is "2019/08/06 4:19:18 PM CDT"
. These entries come from the same Google form
submission and thus belong to the same student.
Note: If you are looking for your personal response within the data, you may have noticed that some of your answers are slightly different from what you had inputted. In order to make SQLite accept our data, and to optimize for as many matches as possible during our joins, we did the following things to clean up the data:
color
andpet
: We converted all the strings to be completely lowercase.- For some of the more "free-spirited" responses, we escaped the special characters so that they could be properly parsed.
You will write all of your solutions in the starter file lab12.sql
provided. As with other
labs, you can test your solutions with OK. In addition, you can use either of
the following commands:
python3 sqlite_shell.py < lab12.sql
python3 sqlite_shell.py --init lab12.sql
Questions
Q1: What Would SQL print?
Note: there is no submission for this question
First, load the tables into sqlite3.
$ python3 sqlite_shell.py --init lab12.sql
Before we start, inspect the schema of the tables that we've created for you:
sqlite> .schema
This tells you the name of each of our tables and their attributes.
Let's also take a look at some of the entries in our table. There are a lot of entries though, so let's just output the first 20:
sqlite> SELECT * FROM students LIMIT 20;
If you're curious about some of the answers students put into the Google form,
open up data.sql
in your favorite text editor and take a look!
For each of the SQL queries below, think about what the query is looking for, then try running the query yourself and see!
sqlite> SELECT * FROM students LIMIT 30; -- This is a comment. * is shorthand for all columns!
______selects first 30 records from students;
sqlite> SELECT color FROM students WHERE number = 7;
______selects the color from students who said their favorite number was 7;
sqlite> SELECT song, pet FROM students WHERE color = "blue" AND date = "12-25";
______selects the song and pet from students who said their favorite color was blue and picked December 25th;
Remember to end each statement with a ;
! To exit out of SQLite, type .exit
or .quit
or hit Ctrl-C
.
Q2: Go Bears! (And Dogs?)
Now that we have learned how to select columns from a SQL table, let's filter the results to see some more interesting results!
It turns out that 61A students have a lot of school spirit: the most popular favorite
color was 'blue'
. You would think that this school spirit would carry over to the
pet answer, and everyone would want a pet bear! Unfortunately, this was not the case,
and the majority of students opted to have a pet 'dog'
instead. That is the more
sensible choice, I suppose...
Write a SQL query to create a table that contains both the column color
and the
column pet
, using the keyword WHERE
to restrict the answers to the most popular
results of color being 'blue'
and pet being 'dog'
.
You should get the following output:
sqlite> SELECT * FROM bluedog;
blue|dog
blue|dog
blue|dog
blue|dog
blue|dog
blue|dog
blue|dog
blue|dog
blue|dog
blue|dog
blue|dog
blue|dog
blue|dog
blue|dog
blue|dog
blue|dog
blue|dog
blue|dog
blue|dog
blue|dog
blue|dog
blue|dog
blue|dog
blue|dog
blue|dog
blue|dog
CREATE TABLE bluedog AS
SELECT "REPLACE THIS LINE WITH YOUR SOLUTION";
This isn't a very exciting table, though. Each of these rows represents a different student, but all this
table can really tell us is how many students both like the color blue and want a dog as a pet, because we
didn't select for any other identifying characteristics. Let's create another table,
bluedog_songs
, that looks just like bluedog
but also tells us how each student
answered the song
question.
You should get the following output:
sqlite> SELECT * FROM bluedog_songs;
blue|dog|Smells like Teen Spirit
blue|dog|The Middle
blue|dog|Clair De Lune
blue|dog|Smells like Teen Spirit
blue|dog|Everytime We Touch
blue|dog|Dancing Queen
blue|dog|Clair De Lune
blue|dog|Clair De Lune
blue|dog|The Middle
blue|dog|Down With The Sickness
blue|dog|thank u, next
blue|dog|All I want for Christmas is you
blue|dog|Everytime We Touch
blue|dog|Clair De Lune
blue|dog|Everytime We Touch
blue|dog|thank u, next
blue|dog|All I want for Christmas is you
blue|dog|Smells like Teen Spirit
blue|dog|The Middle
blue|dog|Clair De Lune
blue|dog|Dancing Queen
blue|dog|All I want for Christmas is you
blue|dog|Dancing Queen
blue|dog|Clair De Lune
blue|dog|Dancing Queen
blue|dog|Dancing Queen
CREATE TABLE bluedog_songs AS
SELECT "REPLACE THIS LINE WITH YOUR SOLUTION";
This distribution of songs actually largely represents the distribution of song choices that the total group of students made, so perhaps all we've learned here is that there isn't a correlation between a student's favorite color and desired pet, and what song they could spend the rest of their life listening to. Even demonstrating that there is no correlation still reveals facts about our data though!
使用 Ok 来测试你的代码:
python3 ok -q bluedog
Q3: The Smallest Unique Positive Integer
Who successfully managed to guess the smallest unique positive integer value? Let's find out!
While we could find out the smallest unique integer using aggregation, for now let's just try hand-inspecting the data. An anonymous elf has informed us that the smallest unique positive value is greater than 2.
Write an SQL query to create a table with the columns time
and smallest
that we can inspect to determine what the smallest integer value is. In order
to make it easier for us to inspect these values, use WHERE
to restrict the
answers to numbers greater than 2, ORDER BY
to sort the numerical values,
and LIMIT
your result to the first 20 values that are greater than the number
2.
Note: Unfortunately, the smallest unique integer doesn't exist in the first 20 values greater than 2. For fun, you can try some new SQL queries (for example, looking at values larger than 10) to see if you can find the smallest unique integer!
CREATE TABLE smallest_int AS
SELECT "REPLACE THIS LINE WITH YOUR SOLUTION";
使用 Ok 来测试你的代码:
python3 ok -q smallest-int
After you've successfully passed the Ok test, take a look at the table
smallest_int
that you just created and manually find the smallest unique
integer value!
To do this, try the following:
$ python3 sqlite_shell.py --init lab12.sql
sqlite> SELECT * FROM smallest_int; -- No LIMIT this time!
Q4: Matchmaker, Matchmaker
Did you take 61A with the hope of finding your quarantine romance? Well you're in luck! With all this data in hand, it's easy for us to find your perfect match. If two students want the same pet and have the same taste in music, they are clearly meant to be together! In order to provide some more information for the potential lovebirds to converse about, let's include the favorite colors of the two individuals as well!
In order to match up students, you will have to do a join on the students
table
with itself. When you do a join, SQLite will match every single row with every single
other row, so make sure you do not match anyone with themselves, or match any given pair
twice!
Important Note: When pairing the first and second person, make sure that the first person responded first (i.e. they have an earlier
time
). This is to ensure your output matches our tests.Hint: When joining table names where column names are the same, use dot notation to distinguish which columns are from which table:
[table_name].[column name]
. This sometimes may get verbose, so it’s stylistically better to give tables an alias using theAS
keyword. The syntax for this is as follows:SELECT <[alias1].[column name1], [alias2].[columnname2]...> FROM <[table_name1] AS [alias1],[table_name2] AS [alias2]...> ...
The query in the football example from earlier uses this syntax.
Write a SQL query to create a table that has 4 columns:
- The shared preferred
pet
of the couple - The shared favorite
song
of the couple - The favorite
color
of the first person - The favorite
color
of the second person
CREATE TABLE matchmaker AS
SELECT "REPLACE THIS LINE WITH YOUR SOLUTION";
使用 Ok 来测试你的代码:
python3 ok -q matchmaker
Q5: Sevens
Let's take a look at data from both of our tables, students
and numbers
,
to find out if students that really like the number 7 also chose '7'
for the
obedience question. Specifically, we want to look at the students that fulfill
the below conditions and see if they also chose '7'
in the question that asked
students to choose the number 7 (column seven
in students
).
Conditions:
- reported that their favorite number (column
number
instudents
) was 7 - have
'True'
in column'7'
innumbers
, meaning they checked the number7
during the survey
In order to examine rows from both the students
and the numbers
table, we will
need to perform a join.
How would you specify the WHERE
clause to make the SELECT
statement only consider
rows in the joined table whose values all correspond to the same student? If
you find that your output is massive and overwhelming, then you are probably missing
the necessary condition in your WHERE
clause to ensure this.
Note: The columns in the
numbers
table are strings with the associated number, so you must put quotes around the column name to refer to it. For example if you alias the table asa
, to get the column to see if a student checked 9001, you must writea.'9001'
.
Write a SQL query to create a table with just the column seven
from
students
, filtering
first for students who said their favorite number (column number
) was 7 in the
students
table and who checked the box for seven (column '7'
) in the numbers
table.
CREATE TABLE sevens AS
SELECT "REPLACE THIS LINE WITH YOUR SOLUTION";
使用 Ok 来测试你的代码:
python3 ok -q sevens