12 Working with

Finally, we also will usually only want some of the columns, not all of them. The asterisk

means   give  me  all  columns .  But  usually  we  don't  want  all  columns,  and  in  many

applications, such as web pages, we could easily be receiving several requests every second. By

reducing the number of columns we ask for, we can speed up whatever web pages or other

applications are using our data.

select album, artist, purchasedate from albums where year=1979 order by

purchastedate, artist, album

SQL statements can often look a lot like English. Don't let this fool you: SQL statements

have a very strict syntax. The spelling, choice of words, and order of parts cannot usually be

modified. For example,  where  always comes before  order by .

Text like this

Sometimes you want to find records where a value contains some piece of text. For example,

we might want to look for albums whose name begins with the word  the .

select album, artist from albums where album like "the %" order by album

The keyword  like  is pretty much just like the equals sign for strings, except that it tells MySQL

to search inside the search string for percent symbols. Wherever it finds a percent symbol, any

text can be present in the actual records. In this case, we've told it to look for values of  album 

that start with  the   and then have any text.

We can have more than one percent in the search string. We might want to look for all of our

 best of  albums, but we don't know where  best of  appears in the album name.

select album, artist from albums where album like "%best of %"