At this point, you have connected to a server, written a simple query and executed it, and saved that query to a file. With simple queries, you typically retrieve all the information in a table. In a production environment, however, you rarely need to view all the information in a table. Instead, you want to retrieve only the rows in a table that meet certain criteria. In this lesson, you will add criteria to your SELECT statements so that you can perform more sophisticated queries.

You have retrieved specific data from a table by using a WHERE clause. But you can do more than just display data that is in a table. You can perform calculations and other operations on data and present it in a desired format. In this lesson, you will use various functions to perform calculations on data to obtain meaningful output from the database.

Retrieving data is the main purpose of most SQL queries. Organizing the data that appears in the result set helps you identify the information that you need instead of searching for it among the retrieved data. In this lesson, you will sort and group data so that the required output is displayed.

Up to now, you have been retrieving and organizing data from a single table using various clauses and functions in SQL. In this lesson, you will retrieve data from multiple tables.

So far in this course, you have queried tables and viewed the results in the Results pane in Microsoft® SQL Server® Management Studio (SSMS). SQL professionals would have no problem with viewing and understanding such results. End users, on the other hand, typically don't have SSMS installed on their computers. For this reason, you need to be able to provide users with data in formats they can use in the applications they do have available to them. In this lesson, you will obtain query results in formats that users can use in other applications and tools.

You'll wrap things up and then validate what you've learned in this course by taking an assessment.