In A Database Environment, What Does "Looking For Records That Satisfy Some Criteria" Mean?

The IT revolution astound the world in every field, nowadays no institution can protract its growth without using information technology ---the language of the new century.  Those days are gone when institutions maintain databases on a register manually. The integrated (DBMS) or distributed database systems (DDBMS) and relational database system (RDBMS) has solved the problem of databases worries now. A database can contain millions of records and trillion of processed data as information in it. The problem arises when anyone need to get a data exactly to his requirement so no information overloading may occurs.

Each DBMS comes with the language called SQL (Structure Query Language) which contains Data manipulation and definition commands for a front-end user to retrieve and update valuable information out of large stored database.

In database environment each value stored in a table is called record. Each column in table is called field. The situation where on need to get a data or a whole record of the employee whose employee number is let say 1001. The following SQL query as per SQL ANSI (American National Standard Institute) standard will satisfy this criterion.

SELECT * FROM Employee WHERE EmployeeNo = 1001
*Where Employee is the table name and EmployeeNo is column in this table.

The query will display all information about Employee whose employee number is 1001 . The '*'  is a wild card  to display all record in a particular table.