Build Your Own ASP.NET 2.0 Web Site Using C# & VB, Second Edition

Viewing Results in Text Format

By default, the query editor of SQL Server Management Studio displays the

results in a grid like the one shown in Figure 8.3. As you work with SQL

Server, you may start to find this view a little impractical; in particular, it

makes viewing longer strings of text painful because each time you run the

query, you need to resize the columns in the grid. Personally, I prefer the

plain text view, which is shown in Figure 8.4. You can enable this mode by

selecting Query > Results To > Results To Text.

Let’s move on and take a look at some variations of the SELECT query. Then we’ll

see how easy it is to insert, modify, and delete items from the database using

other keywords.

Selecting Certain Fields

If you didn’t want to select all the fields from the database table, you’d include

the names of the specific fields that you wanted in place of the * in your query.

For example, if you’re interested only in the department names—not their

IDs—you could execute the following:

SELECT Department

FROM Departments

This statement would retrieve data from the Department field only. Rather than

specifying the *, which would return all the fields within the database table, we

specify only the fields that we need.

Selecting All Columns Using *

To improve performance in real-world development scenarios, it’s better to

ask only for the columns that are of interest, rather than using *. Moreover,

even when you need all the columns in a table, it’s better to specify them by

name, to safeguard against the possibility that future changes, which cause

more columns to be added to the table, affecting the queries you’re writing

now.

It’s important to note that the order of the fields in a table determines the order

in which the data will be retrieved. Take this query, for example:

SELECT DepartmentID, Department

FROM Departments

You could reverse the order in which the columns are returned with this query:

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Selecting Certain Fields