2. An SQL query

Consider a single database table below

Table name: Employees

If we wanted to extract all the records from this table, an SQL query shown below will do so

SELECT * FROM Employees

Let us break down this statement :-

The first term 'SELECT' means extract some records from the database without modifying them in any way.

The star * means 'all records'.

The FROM keyword is used to identify the table(s) to be accessed

'Employees' is the name of the table to be accessed.

So in English, this SQL statement is saying:

"Get me all records from the table called Employees"

This is fine and useful. But it is far more common to limit the records in some way so that only some of them are returned.

The next page discusses this.