In today's lesson, we will discuss the commands to construct tables on MySQL. Data cannot exist by itself inside a database. It must be saved in a structural and organized way within an object called table. Tables are the fundamental objects that carry and present our data in an organized and secure fashion. In other words, our data must be saved to table(s) and tables are saved in a database. So, after the creation of a database, the second and most important task is to create the tables where we will insert our data.

To create a table in MySQL, we must use the clause command CREATE TABLE followed by the name of the new table, followed by a set of column definitions. At the end of the statement, we can optionally specify the storage engine type we would like to use. A column definition is a constraint placed on a particular column to limit the type of values that you can store in that column. In gerenal, there are three major categories of data types: numeric, string, and date/time. Each one of those categories includes subcategories that present specific characteristics.