Here comes the third article in the SQLyog for MySQL series of articles. Today we will deal with the various ways you can insert data into a MySQL database or MariaDB database using SQLyog, which is a powerful MySQL manager and administration tool that can also be used to manage MariaDB database.

Previously we dealt with how to create MySQL tables the easy way with SQLyog. And before that we talked about how to backup a MySQL database using SQLyog. You might also want to know that most of these operations are compatible with MariaDB database.

At this point we will assume that you have your MySQL database server installed and SQLyog downloaded and installed. If not then you would need to download MySQL from here, and download a free copy of SQLyog from here.

For purposes of this tutorial we are going to use a single table in the `test` database that comes with the default installation of MySQL. To get started you can execute this SQL query in SQLyog to create the empty table which we will later populate.

CREATE TABLE `students` (
`sudent_id` smallint(4) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
`first_name` varchar(30) NOT NULL,
`last_name` varchar(30) NOT NULL,
`birth-date` date default NULL,
`gender` enum(‘Female’,'Male’) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`sudent_id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

If you already have a table called `students` you may use a different name that makes sense to you.

1. Direct Entry Into the Table Data Tab View

The tree view on the left hand side of the SQLyog User Interface shows a list of all the databases you have on the particular server you have chosen to open. Expand the `test` database and you should see the table you have just created on the list.

With your Mouse, right-click on the `student` table icon and a context menu should appear. From that menu you should see a menu item labeled open table. Click on it and ypu should see a view of the table you created without any data as illustrated below.

Entering data into this MySQL table quite simple. Below the column name there is a space which you can click on to start entering data. Simply type in the appropriate data from right to left and when you get to the end of the row you can click the save button just above the view to commit the data into the database. Note that you do not need to enter data into the `student_it` column as it is an auto increment column and such a column will be populated automatically by MySQL.