User's Guide

Part II. Tutorials

Chapter 7. Selecting Data from Database Tables

Often, you are only interested in some of the columns in a table. For example, to make up birthday cards for employees you might want to see the emp_lname, dept_id, and birth_date columns.

List the last name, department, and birthdate of each employee:

• Type the following:

       SELECT emp_lname, dept_id, birth_date
       FROM employee
  

emp_lname	dept_id	birth_date
Whitney	100	1958-06-05
Cobb	100	1960-12-04
Chin	200	1966-10-30
Jordan	300	1951-12-13
Breault	100	1947-05-13

Rearranging columns

The three columns appear in the order in which you typed them in the SELECT command. If you want to rearrange the columns, simply change the order of the column names in the command. For example, to put the birth_date column on the left, use the following command:

     SELECT birth_date, emp_lname , dept_id
     FROM employee

Ordering rows

You can order rows and look at only certain columns at the same time as follows:

     SELECT birth_date, emp_lname , dept_id
     FROM employee
     ORDER BY emp_lname

As you might have guessed, the asterisk in

     SELECT * FROM employee

is a short form for all columns in the table.