Question

Previously I had only one table (I have more, ofc, but these are the ones I’m struggling with), which was the UNIVERSITY table.

I now want to create two more tables : STATE and CITY.

Table Attributes

UNIVERSITY: ID, NAME, SHORTNAME, FK_STATE, FK_CITY

STATE: ID, NAME, SHORTNAME

CITY : ID, NAME

Problem

I am parsing a excel sheet for the universities (including the city and state in which this university resides). Once I have all this information in memory, the hardest part comes.

How do I:

Insert all Universities in the database,including its state and city, but querying the STATE and CITY databases for their IDs, to set the FK’s of the university correctly.

Example:
Once I add a University named ‘PUC-RIO’, it is presented in ‘RIO DE JANEIRO’, (city) ‘RIO DE JANEIRO’ (state aswell). Adding the university itself is not a problem, but, how can I update its foreign key to the ‘RIO DE JANEIRO’ Key on state and city tables?

Answer 1

You’ll have to do this for each university:

INSERT INTO UNIVERSITY (..., FK_CITY, FK_STATE)
VALUES (..., (SELECT ID FROM CITY WHERE Name = @city), (SELECT ID FROM STATE WHERE Name = @state))