Retrieving Information from a Table The  pet  table keeps track of which pets you have. If you want to record other information about them, such as events in their lives like visits to the vet or when litters are born, you need another table. What should this table look like? It needs to contain the following information: •The pet name so that you know which animal each event pertains to. •A date so that you know when the event occurred. •A field to describe the event. •An event type field, if you want to be able to categorize events. Given these considerations, the  CREATE TABLE  statement for the  event  table might look like this: As with the  pet  table, it is easiest to load the initial records by creating a tab-delimited text file containing the following information. mysql>  CREATE TABLE event (name VARCHAR(20), date DATE, type VARCHAR(15), remark VARCHAR(255)); name date type remark Fluffy 1995-05-15 litter 4 kittens, 3 female, 1 male Buffy 1993-06-23 litter 5 puppies, 2 female, 3 male Buffy 1994-06-19 litter 3 puppies, 3 female Chirpy 1999-03-21 vet needed beak straightened Slim 1997-08-03 vet broken rib Bowser 1991-10-12 kennel Fang 1991-10-12 kennel Fang 1998-08-28 birthday Gave him a new chew toy Claws 1998-03-17 birthday Gave him a new flea collar Whistler 1998-12-09 birthday First birthday mysql>  LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE ’event.txt’ INTO TABLE event; Load the records like this: Based on what you have learned from the queries that you have run on the  pet  table, you should be able to perform retrievals on the records in the  event  table; the principles are the same. But when is the  event table by itself insufficient to answer questions you might ask? Suppose that you want to find out the ages at which each pet had its litters. We saw earlier how to calculate ages from two dates. The litter date of the mother is in the  event  table, but to calculate her age on that date you need her birth date, which is stored in the  pet  table. This means the query requires both tables: mysql>  SELECT pet.name, TIMESTAMPDIFF(YEAR,birth,date) AS age, remark 324