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SQL AND, OR, NOT

In this tutorial, you will learn how to combine multiple conditions in the WHERE clause using the logical operators AND and OR.

In the previous tutorial, you learned how to filter your data using one condition, but sometimes you need to filter rows based on multiple conditions. The logical operators allow you to use multiple comparisons in one query.

AND	Return True if both conditions are True
OR	Return True if one of conditions is True
NOT	Reverse the result of any Boolean operator
IN	Return True if a value is in a set of values
BETWEEN	Return True if a value falls within a specific range
LIKE	Return True if a value matches a pattern

These logical conditions always return true or false.

The AND operator combines two conditions and returns TRUE only if both conditions are met and if one of the criteria is not met then it returns FALSE.

Syntax

The basic syntax of the AND clause to filter the data returned by a query can be given with:

				
					SELECT
    column_names
FROM table_name
WHERE condition1 AND condition2

The basic syntax of the OR clause to filter the data returned by a query can be given with:

				
					SELECT column_names
FROM table_name
WHERE condition1 OR condition2

The basic syntax of the NOT clause to filter the data returned by a query can be given with:

				
					SELECT column_names
FROM table_name
WHERE NOT condition

AND Example

To understand the ORDER BY statement in a better way, let’s look at the following customers table in our tutorial database:

Customers

customer_id	first_name	last_name	country	score
1	Maria	Cramer	Germany	350
2	John	Steel	USA	900
3	Georg	Pipps	UK	750
4	Martin	Müller	Germany	500
5	Peter	Franken	USA	NULL

Now, let’s check out some examples that demonstrate how it actually works.

We have the following task be to solve using SQL statements

Find all customers who come from Germany AND whose score is less than 400

The following SQL statement will returns all customers from customers table and order the result by the score column in ascending order.

You can have the same the result set by skipping the ASC, because it is the default option in ORDER BY.

				
					SELECT *
FROM customers
WHERE country = 'Germany' 
  AND score < 400

After executing the above query, you’ll get the result set something like this:

Similarly, you can use the DESC option to perform a sorting in descending order. The following statement will orders the result set by the numeric salary column in descending order.

OR Example

As you can see the output contains everything the whole customers tables including all rows and columns.

Find all customers who come from Germany OR whose score is less than 400

				
					SELECT *
FROM customers
WHERE country = 'Germany' 
OR score < 400

NOT Example

You can filter your results in a number of ways using comparison and logical operators, which you’ll learn about in the next tutorials. I summarized in the following table the most important ones.

Find all customers whose score is not less than 400