SQL Predicate Examples

SQL Predicates are simple but important to understand for full use of the query programming language.

Select All
Select Distinct
Select Distinctrow
Select Top
Select Top Percent

The ALL command is the default when you use a select statement:

Select * from Employees

is equivalent to entering

Select All * from Employees The Distinct command is often confused with the distinctrow keyword. Here is an example of the difference:

Select Distinctrow Last_Name from Employees

This query won't necessarily retrieve a distinct list of employee last names. If there are duplicates last names and ANY other field has different data between the two duplicate name records then you will get both records even though they have the same last name. Whereas:

Select Distinct Last_Name from Employees

Use the distinct directive to query unique records. Distinct will retrieve a unique list of employee last names because the Distinct command only looks at the fields you are returning in the query. I have never had a reason to use the Distinctrow function because our tables never have duplicate rows.

Select TOP (aka Top Values/Top Values) is explained in an example page: Select Top 10 Records, but we will review it here combined with the PERCENT option:

Select Top 10 Last_Name from Employees
Order By Age desc

Using the Top 10 example tells the query engine to return 10 records, in this case it will be the 10 oldest employees. Here is the percent option:

Select Top 10 Percent Last_Name from Employees Order By Age desc

In this case, if you had 1000 employees in the Employee table you would retrieve 100 records containing a list of the 100 oldest employees.

Now you know all about the use of predicates in the Microsoft Access programming language.