The Building Blocks of Data Retrieval: SELECT and FROM

As your experience with SQL grows, you will notice that you are typing the words SELECT and FROM more than any other words in the SQL vocabulary. They aren't as glamorous as CREATE or as ruthless as DROP, but they are indispensable to any conversation you hope to have with the computer concerning data retrieval. And isn't data retrieval the reason that you entered mountains of information into your very expensive database in the first place?

This discussion starts with SELECT because most of your statements will also start with SELECT:

SELECT  <COLUMNS NAMES>

Note

Throughout this text there ...

Get Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 21 Days, Fourth Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.