Before diving into the individual commands, it will help to have a grasp of the query language used for WMI queries. The query language is useful when querying classes that return multiple values.

The WMI Query Language (WQL) is used to build queries in WMI for both the CIM and WMI commands.

WQL implements a subset of Structured Query Language (SQL). The keywords that we will look at are traditionally written in uppercase; however, WMI queries are not case-sensitive.

Both the CIM and WMI cmdlets support Filter and Query parameters, which accept WQL queries.