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SQL SELECT statement

SELECT statement is used to select data from the database.

SQL SELECT statement

SELECT statement is used to select data from the database.

The results are stored in a result table, called the result set.

SQL SELECT syntax

SELECT column_name , column_name
FROM table_name ;

versus

SELECT * FROM table_name;

The demo database

In this tutorial, we will use w3big sample database.

The following is a selected "Websites" table data: 

+----+--------------+---------------------------+-------+---------+
| id | name         | url                       | alexa | country |
+----+--------------+---------------------------+-------+---------+
| 1  | Google       | https://www.google.cm/    | 1     | USA     |
| 2  | 淘宝          | https://www.taobao.com/   | 13    | CN      |
| 3  | 本教程      | http://www.w3big.com/    | 4689  | CN      |
| 4  | 微博          | http://weibo.com/         | 20    | CN      |
| 5  | Facebook     | https://www.facebook.com/ | 3     | USA     |
+----+--------------+---------------------------+-------+---------+

SELECT Column examples

The following SQL statement select "name" and "country" column from the "Websites" table:

Examples

SELECT name, country FROM Websites;

The output is:

SELECT * Examples

The following SQL statement selects all columns from the "Websites" table:

Examples

SELECT * FROM Websites;

The output is:

The following command output:

Result set navigation

Most database software systems allow the use of programming functions to navigate in the result set, for example: Move-To-First-Record, Get-Record-Content, Move-To-Next-Record, and so on.

These columns programming functions that are not of this tutorial to explain the similar. To learn knowledge calls to access the data through a function, please visit our ADO tutorial or PHP tutorial .