Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes

Using the WHERE Clause

Database tables usually contain large amounts of data, and you seldom need to retrieve all the rows in a table. More often than not you'll want to extract a subset of the table's data as needed for specific operations or reports. Retrieving just the data you want involves specifying search criteria, also known as a filter condition.

Within a SELECT statement, data is filtered by specifying search criteria in the WHERE clause. The WHERE clause is specified right after the table name (the FROM clause) as follows:

SELECT prod_name, prod_price
FROM Products
WHERE prod_price = 3.49;

This statement retrieves two columns from the products table, but instead of returning all rows, only rows with a prod_price value of 3.49 are ...