Question

Write a query to display the names of the students that start with the letter 'A', ordered in ascending order.

Answer 1

Assuming the table name to be Students and the column name representing the names of students to be Name, the query would be:

Select Name from Students where Name like 'A%' order by Name;

• Select is used to retrieve/display information from the table.
• Where is used to specify conditions.
• Like is a pattern matching clause used to indicate that the data in the column must be of a similar pattern.
• Order by is used to specify the column by whose order the data needs to be sorted alphabetically/numerically, depending on the column's datatype.

When performing pattern matching, there are two wildcard characters that can be used.

Percentage (%) and underscore (_).

• % is used to represent 'n' number of characters.
• _ is used to represent one character.

As per the question, since the only condition for the name is to have 'A' as the first character, we give A% since we don't know the characters/how many characters are present after 'A'.

If the query was to display names starting with A containing 4 characters in total, the pattern would be 'A___'.

By default, the results will be displayed in ascending order.