Selecting records - the basics

Consider the following example table of employee information:

EmployeeID

FirstName

LastName

Department

Age

JoinDate

1001

Phil

Roach

TECH

24

23/1/87

1002

Chris

England

TECH

36

1/10/86

1003

Andreas

Smith

SALES

25

18/6/90

1004

Jim

Smith

ADMIN

30

10/3/92

1005

Julia

Allan

SALES

25

26/9/91

To select the entire table, the SQL command is:

SELECT EmployeeID, FirstName, LastName, Department, Age, JoinDate FROM Employee;

This would return every row and column from the table. The two SQL keywords are SELECT and FROM. Note that every SQL statement ends with a semi-colon ";".

A shorter alternative expression is:

SELECT * FROM Employee;

The asterisk simply stands for all, or every, column.

To select only names and departments, use:

SELECT FirstName, LastName, Department FROM Employee;

Note that you can re-arrange the order of the columns by supplying the field list in a different order. For example:

SELECT Department, FirstName, LastName FROM Employee;

This would give the following results table (or query):

Department

FirstName

LastName

TECH

Phil

Roach

TECH

Chris

England

SALES

Andreas

Smith

ADMIN

Jim

Smith

SALES

Julia

Allan

If your table or field names include spaces, you’ll need to surround them with square brackets as follows:

SELECT [field number 1] FROM [My test table];

See also:

Calculated fields and renaming column titles

Applying a sort order

Selecting top records only

Applying a condition

Numeric comparisons

Date comparisons

Text comparisons

Wildcards

Selecting blank entries

Other types of SQL statements