Sams Teach Yourself ColdFusion® in 21 Days

Understanding Column Aliases

In the introduction to SQL in Day 5, you learned that when you use <CFQUERY> to select records from a datasource, the selected records are returned as variable values corresponding to the field names in your table. Take a look at a sample Microsoft Access table in Figure 19.1.

Figure 19.1. A sample database table in Microsoft Access, designed and named with ColdFusion in mind.

If you've already read Day 2, "Anatomy of a ColdFusion Application," you'll remember this same table from some of the examples there. To access records in this table, you might use a query like this:

 <CFQUERY NAME="get_songs" DATASOURCE="elvis"> ...