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Databases & SQL vocabulary · SQL Statements and Queries

SELECT statement

Meaning in databases & SQL, with examples

nounCore term

In databases & SQL, SELECT statement means: The SQL statement that reads data from one or more tables and returns the matching rows without changing anything in the database.

In Turkish: SELECT sorgusu, seçme sorgusu

How it is used

The statement developers write most. Its main parts are SELECT, FROM, WHERE, GROUP BY, HAVING and ORDER BY. People say 'run a SELECT', 'a simple SELECT' or 'a read query'. 'SELECT *' returns all columns and is fine for exploring but discouraged in application code.

Example sentences

  1. Before you run the DELETE, run the same WHERE condition in a SELECT statement to see which rows it hits.

  2. The reporting user can only run SELECT statements; it has no write access.

Common collocations

  • run a SELECT statement
  • simple SELECT
  • SELECT *
  • SELECT query
  • nested SELECT
  • WHERE clauseThe part of a SQL statement that sets a condition, so only the rows that meet it are read, updated or deleted.
  • joinA SQL operation that combines rows from two or more tables using a related column, such as a customer ID. As a verb, to join tables means to combine them this way.
  • ORDER BYThe SQL clause that sorts the rows of a result by one or more columns, in ascending (ASC) or descending (DESC) order.
  • GROUP BYThe SQL clause that puts rows with the same values into groups so that a total, count or average can be calculated for each group.
  • SELECT DISTINCTA form of the SELECT statement that removes duplicate rows from the result, so each combination of returned values appears only once.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: SQL Statements and Queries

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