SQL WHERE Clause

In this tutorial you will learn how to select specific records from a table using SQL.

The WHERE clause is used to filter records.

It is used to extract only those records that fulfill a specified condition.

WHERE Syntax

SELECT column1, column2, ...
FROM table_name
WHERE condition;

Now, let's check out some examples that demonstrate how it actually works.

Suppose we've a table called employees in our database with the following records:

+--------+--------------+------------+--------+---------+
| emp_id | emp_name     | hire_date  | salary | dept_id |
+--------+--------------+------------+--------+---------+
|      1 | Ethan Hunt   | 2001-05-01 |   5000 |       4 |
|      2 | Tony Montana | 2002-07-15 |   6500 |       1 |
|      3 | Sarah Connor | 2005-10-18 |   8000 |       5 |
|      4 | Rick Deckard | 2007-01-03 |   7200 |       3 |
|      5 | Martin Blank | 2008-06-24 |   5600 |    NULL |
+--------+--------------+------------+--------+---------+

Filter Records with WHERE Clause

The following SQL statement will returns all the employees from the employees table, whose salary is greater than 7000. The WHERE clause simply filtered out the unwanted data.

SELECT * FROM employees
WHERE salary > 7000;

After execution, the output will look something like this:

+--------+--------------+------------+--------+---------+
| emp_id | emp_name     | hire_date  | salary | dept_id |
+--------+--------------+------------+--------+---------+
|      3 | Sarah Connor | 2005-10-18 |   8000 |       5 |
|      4 | Rick Deckard | 2007-01-03 |   7200 |       3 |
+--------+--------------+------------+--------+---------+