SQL SELECT Statement

SQL SELECT Statement

Select statements are used to select data from a table.

The result is stored in a result table, called a result set.

SQL SELECT Syntax

SELECT column name from table name

And:

SELECT * FROM table name

Note: The SQL statement is not case sensitive. Select is equivalent to select.

SQL SELECT Instance

To get the contents of a column named "LastName" and "FirstName" (from a database table named "Persons"), use a SELECT statement like this:

SELECT Lastname,firstname from Persons

"Persons" table: City

Id	LastName	FirstName	Address
1	Adams	John	Oxford Street	London
2	Bush	George	Fifth Avenue	New York
3	Carter	Thomas	Changan Street	Beijing

Results:

LastName	FirstName
Adams	John
Bush	George
Carter	Thomas

SQL SELECT * Instance

Now we want to pick all the columns from the "Persons" table.

Use the symbol * instead of the name of the column, just like this:

*From Persons

Tip: An asterisk (*) is a shortcut to select all columns.

Results: City

Id	LastName	FirstName	Address
1	Adams	John	Oxford Street	London
2	Bush	George	Fifth Avenue	New York
3	Carter	Thomas	Changan Street	Beijing

Navigating in the result set (Result-set)

The results obtained by the SQL query program are stored in a result set. Most database software systems allow the use of programming functions to navigate the result set, such as: Move-to-first-record, Get-record-content, Move-to-next-record, and so on.

Similar to these programming functions are not listed in this tutorial. To learn about accessing data through function calls, please visit our ADO tutorials and PHP tutorials.

SQL SELECT Statement