SQL SELECT statement The SELECT statement tells the query optimizer what data to return, what tables to look in, what relations to follow, and what order to impose on the returned data.

Read this SQL tutorial to learn when to use SELECT, JOIN, subselects and UNION to access multiple tables with a single statement. It’s sometimes difficult to know which SQL syntax to use when ...

FROM table1, table2 WHERE table1.keyfield=table2.keyfield When you execute a statement like this, SQL creates a new table—the results recordset—based on the contents of table1 and table2.

SELECT statement. SQL Server 2000 introduces SQL collations, a large collection of named collation types that specify different combinations of character sets and sort orders.