Manipulating SQL database data

There are some common tasks that you perform when you're working with local SQL databases. These tasks include connecting to a database, adding data to tables, and retrieving data from tables in a database. There are also several issues you'll want to keep in mind while performing these tasks, such as working with data types and handling errors.

Note that there are also several database tasks that are things you'll deal with less frequently, but will often need to do before you can perform these more common tasks. For example, before you can connect to a database and retrieve data from a table, you'll need to create the database and create the table structure in the database. Those less-frequent initial setup tasks are discussed in Creating and modifying a database.

You can choose to perform database operations asynchronously, meaning the database engine runs in the background and notifies you when the operation succeeds or fails by dispatching an event. You can also perform these operations synchronously. In that case the database operations are performed one after another and the entire application (including updates to the screen) waits for the operations to complete before executing other code. For more information on working in asynchronous or synchronous execution mode, see Using synchronous and asynchronous database operations.