Oracle Database Foundations

2.3. The Ubiquitous SELECT Statement

In the examples of tools for running SQL, you've seen the following simple SELECT statement:

select * from dept;

In its most basic form, the SELECT statement has a list of columns to select from a table, using the SELECT ... FROM syntax. The * means "all columns." To successfully retrieve rows from a table, the user running the query must either own the table or have the permissions granted to the user by the owner or a DBA. The most basic SELECT syntax can be described as follows:

SELECT {* | [DISTINCT] column| expression [alias], ...}
  FROM tablename;

This type of statement representation is typical of what you'll see in Oracle documentation, and it can be very complex. Here is a summary of what the elements ...