If you learn "standard" SQL, you'll have a pretty good grasp of how to query tables in Oracle. However, Oracle has its own variant called PL/SQL (Procedural Language/Structured Query Language), so some standard queries will look a little different.
Let’s use this simple table named “campuses” as an example:
It's pretty easy to write some SQL to retrieve the Morris row. If we happen to know the ID (which is unique), we could query it with SELECT * FROM CAMPUSES WHERE ID = 3; (The "*" character says give me all the columns.) This query would return:
However, most of the time we don't have IDs memorized. We could get the same information with SELECT * FROM CAMPUSES WHERE NAME = 'Morris'; This is a much more intuitive query.
Note: I mentioned above that Oracle has its own version of SQL. I used single quotes around Morris in my query. My query would cause an error if I used double quotes. Other relational databases are not as opinionated about single vs. double quotes. This is just one example of the subtleties of working with Oracle.
