Loading Data into a Table For more information about MySQL data types, see Chapter 11,  Data Types . After creating your table, you need to populate it. The  LOAD DATA  and  INSERT  statements are useful for this. Suppose that your pet records can be described as shown here. (Observe that MySQL expects dates in ’ YYYY-MM-DD ’  format; this may differ from what you are used to.) Because you are beginning with an empty table, an easy way to populate it is to create a text file containing a row for each of your animals, then load the contents of the file into the table with a single statement. You could create a text file  pet.txt  containing one record per line, with values separated by tabs, and given in the order in which the columns were listed in the  CREATE TABLE  statement. For missing values (such as unknown sexes or death dates for animals that are still living), you can use  NULL  values. To represent these in your text file, use  \N  (backslash, capital-N). For example, the record for Whistler the bird would look like this (where the whitespace between values is a single tab character): To load the text file  pet.txt  into the  pet  table, use this statement: If you created the file on Windows with an editor that uses  \r
  as a line terminator, you should use this statement instead: (On an Apple machine running macOS, you would likely want to use  LINES TERMINATED BY ’\r’ .) You can specify the column value separator and end of line marker explicitly in the  LOAD DATA  statement if you wish, but the defaults are tab and linefeed. These are sufficient for the statement to read the file pet.txt  properly. If the statement fails, it is likely that your MySQL installation does not have local file capability enabled by default. See Section 6.1.6, “Security Considerations for LOAD DATA LOCAL” , for information on how to change this. When you want to add new records one at a time, the  INSERT  statement is useful. In its simplest form, you supply values for each column, in the order in which the columns were listed in the  CREATE TABLE 311 mysql>  LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE ’/path/pet.txt’ INTO TABLE pet LINES TERMINATED BY ’\r
’; mysql>  LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE ’/path/pet.txt’ INTO TABLE pet; Whistler Gwen bird \N 1997-12-09 \N 3.3.3 Loading Data into a Table name owner species sex birth death Fluffy Harold cat f 1993-02-04 Claws Gwen cat m 1994-03-17 Buffy Harold dog f 1989-05-13 Fang Benny dog m 1990-08-27 Bowser Diane dog m 1979-08-31 1995-07-29 Chirpy Gwen bird f 1998-09-11 Whistler Gwen bird 1997-12-09 Slim Benny snake m 1996-04-29