Learn SQL in a Month of Lunches

3 Querying data

In chapter 2, we looked at a spreadsheet of fictional books to better understand some core concepts about tables in a relational database management system (RDBMS). With that spreadsheet in mind, we’re going to work with a table that looks a lot like that spreadsheet and see some of the ways we can retrieve data using the SELECT command.

First, though, let’s take a deeper look at your first query. Although it was simple, it had all the minimum components for a query. Let’s briefly examine those components as well as some potential problems regarding formatting and the use of certain words.

3.1 Rules for the SELECT statement

Chapters 1 and 2 discussed the conversational way to think about writing a query, so let’s take a moment ...