LU06b - SQL-DQL: Select from one table

The simplest SELECT is reading from a table, as we don't have to deal with the connection between other tables. Let's have a quick look on the different parts of an average SELECT statement. Therefore, we will use our Customer Table as practical example for demonstration purposes.

Souce: W3Schools | SELECT clause

We can use the SELECT in different ways, e.g

• SELECT *
  • * (asterix) stands here for all columns in the table
  • the entire content of the table, columns as created, sorted by the primary key in ascending order.
• SELECT myColumn1, myColumn3, myColumn5
  • By specifying the columns we want to retrieve, we can reduce the output according to our needs.
  • The target columns are to seperated by commas
• SELECT myColumn3, myColumn5, myColumn1
  • We can also change the order in which the columns are to be displayed

Our first SQL statement is almost complete, for we need to name the source from which we want to retrieve the data. In our case it is the table Customer. Our SELECT including the FROM clause would look like:

 SELECT *
 FROM Customers;

Source: W3Schools | WHERE clause

By adding the WHERE clause to the base SQL statement, we can reduce our output. In other words, we filter our output according to the defined criterias. E.g. if we only want to select data from one particular postal code 05023, we simply add that in our WHERE clause as shown below:

 SELECT *
 FROM Customers
 WHERE PostalCode ='05023';

Source: W3Schools | ORDER BY clause

In modern web applications, it is common for us to be able to choose how we want to retrieve the data, as the usual sorting criteria are name, date of birth or social security number. We realize this by the adding the keywords ORDER BY to our SQL statement, followed by the keywords ASC or DESC. Our SQL statement hen would look like:

SELECT  PostalCode, CustomerName, ContactName
FROM Customers
ORDER BY PostalCode DESC ;

In this case we call up a list of customers (Customername, ContanctName, PostalCode), which is ordered descending by the zip code. Hence, the resultset looks like:

Source: W3Schools | SQL Operators

It might be necessary to get data only to one specific person or product, or we want to know which products are on stock. For such cases SQL offers, as many programming languages, a variety of Operators which help to optimize our result set. Relevant for our use are the folling operators:

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