MySQL

Retrieving Records

It does no good to put records in a database unless you retrieve them eventually and do something with them. That's the purpose of the SELECT statement: to help you get at your data. SELECT is probably the most commonly used statement in the SQL language, but it can also be the trickiest; the constraints you use to choose rows can be arbitrarily complex and can involve comparisons between columns in many tables.

The basic syntax of the SELECT statement looks like this:

SELECT selection_list	What columns to select
FROM table_list	Where to select rows from
WHERE primary_constraint	What conditions rows must satisfy
GROUP BY grouping_columns	How to group results
ORDER BYsorting_columns	How to sort results
HAVINGsecondary_constraint	Secondary ...