Tell the server where to look for the data

SELECT * | <value1>, <value2>
FROM <table_name>;

It's like saying: "Hey, PostgreSQL; please can you find this information for me? It's in this table in this schema. When you find this information, please read it back to me"

For example:

Return a list of all 129 products and all of their attributes to the results panel

SELECT *
FROM "sequel-mart-schema"."Products";

Return a list of all products and some of their attributes to the results panel

SELECT product_id, product_category, product_item, popularity
FROM "sequel-mart-schema"."Products";

Notes:

• You can drag the table from the browser into the Query Tool panel
• SELECT * is short-hand for 'include every column in the table'
  • This is good for profiling data in a test environment
  • However it is considered 'lazy' and can be problematic if columns are changed
  • For a production environment it is better to only use the columns you need
• The column names which were previously ?column? are replaced with the name in the table
• The data type of the column is included
  • e.g. product_item only accepts varying character strings of no more than 50 characters

Distinct

When we have a list of values in a column with a lot of duplicates it can be useful to get a unique list

If we say

SELECT product_category
FROM "sequel-mart-schema"."Products";

we will just get the categories of all 129 rows.

There are a lot of repeated values which makes it hard to tell how many categories there are

However if we were to say:

SELECT DISTINCT product_category
FROM "sequel-mart-schema"."Products";

We would get the 4 unique (DISTINCT) product categories we sell