The SELECT statement is without question the most complex amongst MySQL’s data manipulation statements. Not surprising when you consider that the foremost purpose of structured query language (SQL) is to retrieve information from a relational database which adheres to a given criteria. Entire books have been written about how to construct a query to fetch the data that you’re after. That’s not the purpose of this article. Our goal will be to cover the syntax of the SELECT statement and gain an understanding of its many optional clauses. We’ll start at the beginning and work our way through them. When we’re done, you’ll understand which clauses to use for different purposes. We’ll leave the twenty table joins for another day.

This application can easily be coded in Python with performance levels of thousands of transactions per second on a desktop PC. Simple sample programs for the server and client sides are listed below, with discussions following

'dialog' is a utility for building console-based 'front ends' in UNIX like operating systems.

In this brief tutorial I am mentioning the usage of few important basic controls available with this 'dialog' utility and later I have created a very simple front end application in UNIX bash scripting using dialog.

$ cat arraymanip.sh
#! /bin/bash
Unix[0]='Debian'
Unix[1]='Red hat'
Unix[2]='Ubuntu'
Unix[3]='Suse'

echo ${Unix[1]}

$./arraymanip.sh
Red hat