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About this lesson

Here we will start to write SQL statements and queries, starting with basic SELECT statements

Exercise files

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Simple SELECT Statements
58.7 KB Simple SELECT Statements - Solution
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Quick reference

Simple SELECT Statements

Select statements are the main structure of SQL

When to use

Anytime you want to use SQL, you'll likely use a Select Statement.

Instructions

Select statements select data from our database to display.

  • To use T-SQL in SSMS, right click on our table in the object explorer, and choose "Select Top 1000 Rows"
  • Type in your SQL. To run your SQL Commands, click the Execute button.
  • The select statement is the following:

SELECT [COLUMN NAME 1], [COLUMN NAME 2], [COLUMN NAME 3]

FROM [DATABASE NAME], [DATABASE TABLE]

Hints & tips

  • To use T-SQL right click on our table in the object explorer, and choose "Select Top 1000 Rows"
  • To run your SQL Commands, click the Execute button.
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  • 00:05 We've installed SQL Server 2016, we've created our database, we've created our
  • 00:09 table, we've put some data in it, we've saved a backup, we've restored it.
  • 00:13 Now, we're gonna talk about SQL and SQL statements, and pretty much,
  • 00:18 the rest of the course, we're just gonna focus on different SQL items.
  • 00:21 When it comes to SQL the main
  • 00:24 thing that you're gonna be working with is something called a SELECT statement.
  • 00:27 And that's what we're gonna talk about in this video,
  • 00:29 the SELECT statement is the structure of all of it.
  • 00:33 Everything you do is gonna build on your SELECT statement,
  • 00:36 so in this video we're just gonna create a very simple SELECT statement.
  • 00:40 And then in the following videos we'll build on that statement to
  • 00:43 do more advanced things, more intricate things.
  • 00:46 And what we're talking about here is getting data out of our database, basically.
  • 00:49 So we've got a database, now how do we pull information out of there?
  • 00:54 Well, we can just look at it and we can see we've got these six rows and
  • 00:58 I might add some more a little bit later just to flesh this out a little bit more.
  • 01:01 But normally, you're gonna have thousands of rows, hundreds of thousands,
  • 01:05 tens of thousands, maybe millions of rows, so you can't just eyeball this thing.
  • 01:08 You need some way to pull specific data out, and that's what we use SQL for.
  • 01:13 So to use SQL in Microsoft SQL Server 2016,
  • 01:16 we're just gonna come to our database down here and highlight our table.
  • 01:21 And then right-click and I'm gonna click Select Top 1000 Rows.
  • 01:27 Now this will allow us to do a T-SQL which is Microsoft's SQL of choice here and
  • 01:32 this allows us to write SQL on this little panel right here.
  • 01:37 And we have a SQL statement that they've already done for
  • 01:40 us just by clicking on that.
  • 01:42 Select Top 1000 rows there, and
  • 01:44 what it's done is selected the top 1000 rows, here is the output, right?
  • 01:50 And we can see we can't change any of this data, this is just for
  • 01:54 visual purposes, we could just look at this here.
  • 01:56 But before we get into that I'm gonna delete all of these stuff and
  • 02:00 we're gonna start from scratch here.
  • 02:02 A SELECT statement starts with the word select and
  • 02:05 then you have to tell the program what you wanna select.
  • 02:08 The format is, list all the columns that you want separated by commas,
  • 02:13 each one is put in these straight brackets, right?
  • 02:17 So if we wanted to select every first name,
  • 02:21 that's one of our columns, first name.
  • 02:23 And as we type, you'll notice this fills it in for us if we click that, we might
  • 02:28 want the last name and again, we can do that, and let's say we want the age.
  • 02:37 Each of these are columns, they're separated by commas,
  • 02:40 then the second line here is from.
  • 02:43 Where are we pulling this stuff from or
  • 02:45 we're pulling it from our customer database, that's this guy right here.
  • 02:49 And specifically, this table which is our table, DBO.current_customers.
  • 02:55 So here's our statement, we're saying, select the first name, the last name and
  • 03:00 the age from our current customers table and our customers database.
  • 03:05 To run this, to execute it, you come up here to this little Execute button and
  • 03:09 you just click it, and you see down here, it changes to exactly what we want.
  • 03:12 So we have John Elder, age 39, first name, last name, and age, which
  • 03:16 of course corresponds to first name, last name, and age up there, and that's it.
  • 03:21 Very simple. We think of SQL as a programming language,
  • 03:25 it's not really a programming language,
  • 03:27 it sort of is, but it's really easy, this is it, this is very easy.
  • 03:32 Here's another quick tip before we end this video, we designated first name,
  • 03:36 last name and age, we can designate everything by using the star.
  • 03:39 And if we come over here to execute, then again we get everything in our table,
  • 03:43 so that's a neat thing to remember.
  • 03:46 So that is the simple SELECT statement, very, very simple.
  • 03:49 So in the next video, we're gonna talk about the WHERE clause,
  • 03:52 it will allow us to pull data in a more specific manner.

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