Creating a Table mysql>  CREATE DATABASE menagerie; Under Unix, database names are case-sensitive (unlike SQL keywords), so you must always refer to your database as  menagerie , not as  Menagerie ,  MENAGERIE , or some other variant. This is also true for table names. (Under Windows, this restriction does not apply, although you must refer to databases and tables using the same lettercase throughout a given query. However, for a variety of reasons, the recommended best practice is always to use the same lettercase that was used when the database was created.) If you get an error such as  ERROR 1044 (42000): Access denied for user ’micah’@’localhost’ to database ’menagerie’  when attempting to create a database, this means that your user account does not have the necessary privileges to do so. Discuss this with the administrator or see Section 6.2, “Access Control and Account Management” . Creating a database does not select it for use; you must do that explicitly. To make  menagerie  the current database, use this statement: mysql>  USE menagerie Database changed Your database needs to be created only once, but you must select it for use each time you begin a  mysql session. You can do this by issuing a  USE  statement as shown in the example. Alternatively, you can select the database on the command line when you invoke  mysql . Just specify its name after any connection parameters that you might need to provide. For example: shell>  mysql -h  host  -u  user  -p menagerie Enter password:  ******** menagerie  in the command just shown is  not  your password. If you want to supply your password on the command line after the  -p  option, you must do so with no intervening space (for example, as  -p password , not as  -p  password ). However, putting your password on the command line is not recommended, because doing so exposes it to snooping by other users logged in on your machine. You can see at any time which database is currently selected using  SELECT DATABASE() . Creating the database is the easy part, but at this point it is empty, as  SHOW TABLES  tells you: mysql>  SHOW TABLES; Empty set (0.00 sec) The harder part is deciding what the structure of your database should be: what tables you need and what columns should be in each of them. You want a table that contains a record for each of your pets. This can be called the  pet  table, and it should contain, as a bare minimum, each animal’s name. Because the name by itself is not very interesting, the table should contain other information. For example, if more than one person in your 309 3.3.2 Creating a Table Note Important Note