Departments in New York — WHERE Clause in SQL

The problem

Helix Systems' facilities team is updating the New York office directory ahead of a building security review.

Write a query to return the name and location of every department based in New York.

Assumptions:

The departments table contains every department at Helix Systems.
The location column records the office city for each department; New York departments have location set to 'New York'.

Output:

One row per New York department, with columns name and location.

Schema · hr 4 tables

departments

id integer

name text

location text

budget numeric

salaries

id integer

employee_id integer

amount numeric

effective_date date

end_date? date

employees

id integer

name text

email text

department_id integer

manager_id? integer

hire_date date

title text

is_active boolean

job_history

id integer

employee_id integer

title text

department_id integer

start_date date

end_date? date

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Worked solution Try it yourself first

Solution query

SELECT
  name,
  location
FROM
  departments
WHERE
  location = 'New York'

The shape

An equality check on location narrows the directory to a single office. The two-word value goes inside single quotes as a string literal, spaces included.

Clause by clause

SELECT name, location returns the two columns the facilities team needs to confirm which department is which and that they are all reading from the same office. The location column travels through the filter and lands in the output — referencing a column in WHERE doesn't disqualify it from SELECT.
FROM departments is the source — every department at Helix Systems.
WHERE location = 'New York' keeps only the rows whose location value is exactly the string 'New York'. The space between the two words is part of the literal; the quotes wrap the entire value as one string.

The trap

String equality in PostgreSQL is byte-for-byte. 'New York' does not match 'new york', 'NEW YORK', 'New York' with two spaces, or 'New York ' with a trailing space. When real data has been entered by hand over time, the same city can show up under several spellings, and an exact-match filter quietly leaves the variants out of the result.

You practiced an equality filter on a string column. String-equality filters are case-sensitive — 'New York' only matches rows with that exact value, not 'NEW YORK' or 'new york'.

Return the name and location of every department based in New York

The shape

Clause by clause

The trap

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