The SELECT ... FROM Clause
The most basic SELECT
statement has only 2 parts: (1) what columns you want to return and (2) what
table(s) those columns come from.
If we want to retrieve
all of the information about all of the customers in the Employees table, we
could use the asterisk (*) as a shortcut for all of the columns, and our query
looks like
SELECT * FROM Employees
If we want only specific
columns (as is usually the case), we can/should explicitly specify them in a
comma-separated list, as in
SELECT EmployeeID, FirstName, LastName, HireDate, City FROM
Employees
which results in the
specified fields of data for all of the rows in the table:
Explicitly specifying
the desired fields also allows us to control the order in which the fields are
returned, so that if we wanted the last name to appear before the first name,
we could write
SELECT EmployeeID, LastName, FirstName, HireDate, City FROM
Employees
