There are situations in which only a few rows need to be retrieved from the table based on a condition. The WHERE clause is provided by SQL server to specify the condition. The WHERE clause not only used in SELECT statement, but it is also used in UPDATE, DELETE statement etc.
The syntax for using the WHERE clause is:
SELECT column_list FROM table_name WHERE search_condition
Example:
SELECT * FROM Publishers WHERE State = ‘MA’
Here, the result set of the SELECT statement contains only those rows from the publishers table in which the State is MA.