Retrieving Information from a Table mysql>  SELECT * FROM pet WHERE (species = ’cat’ AND sex = ’m’) OR (species = ’dog’ AND sex = ’f’); +-------+--------+---------+------+------------+-------+ | name | owner | species | sex | birth | death | +-------+--------+---------+------+------------+-------+ | Claws | Gwen | cat | m | 1994-03-17 | NULL | | Buffy | Harold | dog | f | 1989-05-13 | NULL | +-------+--------+---------+------+------------+-------+ If you do not want to see entire rows from your table, just name the columns in which you are interested, separated by commas. For example, if you want to know when your animals were born, select the  name and  birth  columns: 3.3.4.3 Selecting Particular Columns mysql>  SELECT name, birth FROM pet; mysql>  SELECT owner FROM pet; +--------+ | owner | +--------+ | Harold | | Gwen | | Harold | | Benny | | Diane | | Gwen | | Gwen | | Benny | | Diane | +--------+ mysql>  SELECT DISTINCT owner FROM pet; +--------+ | owner | +--------+ | Benny | | Diane | | Gwen | | Harold | +--------+ +----------+------------+ | name | birth | +----------+------------+ | Fluffy | 1993-02-04 | | Claws | 1994-03-17 | | Buffy | 1989-05-13 | | Fang | 1990-08-27 | | Bowser | 1989-08-31 | | Chirpy | 1998-09-11 | | Whistler | 1997-12-09 | | Slim | 1996-04-29 | | Puffball | 1999-03-30 | +----------+------------+ To find out who owns pets, use this query: Notice that the query simply retrieves the  owner  column from each record, and some of them appear more than once. To minimize the output, retrieve each unique output record just once by adding the keyword DISTINCT : You can use a  WHERE  clause to combine row selection with column selection. For example, to get birth dates for dogs and cats only, use this query: 314