What database program can be used for this?

I'm in a database cl开发者_Go百科ass. We're learning about joins, unions, and projections.

Is there a program that would be helpful in getting practice? Like I an expression and it selects the appropriate fields in a table.

Please don't bother downloading and trying to install a server DBMS (plus one or more clients) for this simple task. If you're taking a course in being a database administrator you might want to spend hours learning these technologies (and, if you go on to work with these products seriously you will, eventually, need to master some of them), but if you just want to practice SQL queries, there are sites that let you do just this.

You can find some nice on-line exercises here: http://sqlzoo.net/.

MySql is easy to use and free so that would be my choice. The community server is the one you want to download.

http://www.mysql.com/

I would recommend getting the Workbench tool as well to make this easier to create tables and mess around with them.

Download and install Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Express, with Management Tools. Has everything you need to get started and it's 100% free.

You can get it here: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/editions/express.aspx

Or if you are willing to part with $50, you can buy SQL Server 2008 R2 Developer Edition (full enterprise/data center edition, just with licensing restricting only to development, testing, and demoing) to do some really cool stuff.