SQL - Not equal to (!=) Operator

The SQL != (not equal to) operator checks if the value of left operand is not equal to the value of right operand and returns true if the condition is true, false otherwise.

Syntax

The syntax for using not equal to operator is given below:

expression != expression

Parameters

expression Any valid expression. Both expressions must have implicitly convertible data types.

Example 1:

The example below shows the usage of not equal to operator:

SELECT 10 != 10;
Result: 0

SELECT 10.0 != 10;
Result: 0

SELECT 10 != 20;
Result: 1

SELECT 'abc' != 'abc';
Result: 0

SELECT 'abc' != 'xyz';
Result: 1

Example 2:

Consider a database table called Employee with the following records:

EmpID	Name	City	Age	Salary
1	John	London	25	3000
2	Marry	New York	24	2750
3	Jo	Paris	27	2800
4	Kim	Amsterdam	30	3100
5	Ramesh	New Delhi	28	3000
6	Huang	Beijing	28	2800

To select records of table where Age of the person is not equal to 28, the query is given below.

SELECT * FROM Employee
WHERE Age != 28;

The query will produce following result:

EmpID	Name	City	Age	Salary
1	John	London	25	3000
2	Marry	New York	24	2750
3	Jo	Paris	27	2800
4	Kim	Amsterdam	30	3100

❮ SQL Operators