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MySQL® Crash Course
book

MySQL® Crash Course

by Ben Forta
December 2005
Intermediate to advanced
336 pages
4h 52m
English
Sams
Content preview from MySQL® Crash Course

Chapter 4. Retrieving Data

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to use the SELECT statement to retrieve one or more columns of data from a table.

The SELECT Statement

As explained in Chapter 1, “Understanding SQL,” SQL statements are made up of plain English terms. These terms are called keywords, and every SQL statement is made up of one or more keywords. The SQL statement you’ll probably use most frequently is the SELECT statement. Its purpose is to retrieve information from one or more tables.

To use SELECT to retrieve table data you must, at a minimum, specify two pieces of information—what you want to select, and from where you want to select it.

Retrieving Individual Columns

We’ll start with a simple SQL SELECT statement, as follows:

Input

SELECT ...
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