As a platform Magento is built on the Zend Framework, therefore we can utilise the Zend Framework Database Class for reading from and writing to the Magento database. These actions would normally be used in a custom magento module or standalone script that you have running on your site.
Direct database actions should be handled with care as they do exactly as it says and make changes directly to the database… hmmm obviously.
// Setup the $read object.
// Get all of the SKU codes in the database?
// Just get the first sku from the database.
You can see that we pass a second parameter in the from() section of the query, this will define which row is returned.