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Practice sql to learn SQL syntax

By Sergey Skudaev


You can use this web page to practice writing SQL select queries. Of cause, SQL queries are not limited to select statement. There is update, delete and insert SQL statement, but SELECT SQL statement is the most important and most challenging to learn. Why is SELECT SQL statement most important? Because to write a correct update or delete SQL statement, you must be able to select correct database record that you want to update or delete.

Let us imagine that we have a computer school where we teach different computer programming classes: Java, Visual Basic, C++. For our computer school management, we created a database with the following tables.

One table is for teachers, one for students and one for computer courses. To link tables to each other, we created teachers-schedule table and students-courses table. Fields for these tables are shown in the table below:

For example, if we want to know which student is older than 21 and we write a query:

SELECT * FROM students WHERE age > 21

Or we want to get information a student whose first name is Michael:

SELECT * FROM students WHERE firstname='Michael'

You see how it is easy. Let us try something more complicated.

Students who take a Java class:

SELECT students.firstname, students.lastname from students JOIN student_course ON
students.studentid=student_course.studentid JOIN courses ON
student_course.courseid=courses.courseid
WHERE courses.coursename='Java'

The teacher name who teaches Java class:

SELECT t.firstname, t.lastname FROM teachers t JOIN schedule s ON t.teacherid=s.teacherid
JOIN courses c ON s.courseid=c.courseid WHERE c.coursename='Java'

Copy the query, paste it in the text area and click Submit button. The query result will be displayed!"

A visitor of this page has only permission for executing select queries.

Try to write queries on your own. To find out what data is in any table execute query "SELECT * FROM [table name]"

Write queries:
1. Find which courses Michael Murphy is teaching.
2. Find the schedule when the teaher Michael Murphy has classes.
3. Find the schedule when the student Michael has classes.
3. Find what average student age in Java class is.
4. Find at what time the PHP class starts.

select firstname, lastname from students
Your Query Result
  firstname  lastname
  John    Jamesons  
  Michael    Johnson  
  John    Williams  
  Lee    George  
  Molly    James  
  Holly    Michaels  
  Cindy    Brown  
  Julia    Barklay  
  Alison    Cremette  
  James    Folkner  
  Michael    Holden  
  Ryan    Brown  

I wrote an eBook base on this page. It includes about 100 query examples:
Learn SQL Programming By Examples


Select a query