Selecting and Viewing Records

In the I Break Code’s Inserting Records post we inserted two authors into our Authors table and two books into our Books table, which reside in our Library database. After we insert this information into our database, we need some means of retrieving that information. We can do that with the SELECT statement.

The SELECT statement is fairy simple to use. We can use it to select specific columns, or all columns.

Let’s say we wanted to view all our records, or rows, in our Authors table. We would write it like this:

1. USE Library;
2. GO
3.  
4. SELECT * FROM Authors;

And SQL Server would return this output when executed:

author_ID	first_Name	last_Name
1	Geoffrey	Chaucer
2	William	Shakespeare

And if we wanted to select our books from our database we would do it like so:

1. USE Library;
2. GO
3.  
4. SELECT * FROM Books;

And SQL Server would return this output when executed:

book_ID	title	genre	description
1	The Cantebury Tales	Classic/Poetry	A great collection of poems and stories.
2	Macbeth	Classic/Play	"Fair is foul, and foul is fair". - ( Quote Act I, Scene I).

We can also specify exactly what columns we want to select from our tables too:

1. USE Library;
2. GO
3.  
4. SELECT first_Name, last_Name FROM Authors;
5. SELECT title FROM Books;

And SQL Server would return this output:

Output from line 4:

first_Name	last_Name
Geoffrey	Chaucer
William	Shakespeare

Output from line 5:

title

The Cantebury Tales

Macbeth

Try  experimenting by selecting different combinations of column names, in different orders, or the same column names multiple times to see what kind of output you can come up with.