MySQL Basics: Select Exercises

The US Government organizes and publishes online a publically accessible database of various information and statistics organized by country. Each year, a new version of the "CIA Worldfactbook" is made available. Via the website (https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html) it's possible to download the lot as a big zip of HTML files. Handy for planning your next coup when out of range of an Internet connection, but much more interesting would be to do retrieval / summarizing with SQL...

Happily, using the open source wfb2sql script, http://wfb2sql.sourceforge.net/, it's possible to convert / scrape these HTML files into SQL suitable for "sourcing" into your very own MySQL database.

A sample resulting database (based on 2004 data):

• attachment:factbook2004.sql.gz

Download the MySQL handouts! (8 pages) [1]

Exercises

• attachment:SQLSelectExercises1.pdf
• attachment:SQLSelectExercises2.pdf