SQL SELECT Statement

The SQL SELECT Statement

The SELECT statement is used to select data from a table. The tabular result is stored in a result table (called the result-set).

Syntax

Note: SQL statements are not case sensitive. SELECT is the same as select.

SQL SELECT Example

To select the content of columns named "Title", "Author", and "Year", from the database table called "Books", we use a SELECT statement like this:

The database table "Books":

The result is:

Select All Columns

To select all columns from the "Books" table, we use a * symbol instead of column names, like this: 

The result is:

The SELECT DISTINCT Statement

The DISTINCT keyword is used to return only distinct (different) values.

The SELECT statement returns information from table columns. But what if we only want to select distinct elements?

With SQL, all we need to do is to add a DISTINCT keyword to the SELECT statement:

Syntax

Using the DISTINCT keyword

To select ALL values from the column named "Publisher" we use a SELECT statement like this:

The result is:

 Note that "Fast Press" is listed trice in the result-set.

To select only DIFFERENT values from the column named "Publisher" we use a SELECT DISTINCT statement like this:

The result is:

 Now "Fast Press" is listed only once in the result-set.

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