Sometimes life is too surreal. Like when somebody says, “How do you get title case in an Oracle database?” That’s when you know three things about the individual, while suppressing laughter. They’re not very experienced with SQL, likely lazy, and don’t read the documentation.

I had a little fun with somebody today by taking them down a small rat-hole. “Oh, gosh … ” I said, “… let’s write a function for that.” Here’s the joke function, like:

CREATE OR REPLACE
FUNCTION title_case
( string VARCHAR2 ) RETURN VARCHAR2 IS
BEGIN
  /* Change upper case to title case. */
  RETURN UPPER(SUBSTR(string,1,1)) || LOWER(SUBSTR(string,2,LENGTH(string)));
END title_case;
/

Then, we tested it with a query from the pseudo dual table:

SELECT title_case('incredible') AS "Proper Name" FROM dual;

It returned:

Proper Name
----------
Incredible

Then, I said “Oh, that’s not his …

My students liked the MySQL Transaction post but wanted one that showed how an external web application would interact with MySQL in the scope of a transaction. So, I put a little PHP function together that write across two related tables in the context of a transaction. It uses mysqli (MySQL Improved Extension) to connect PHP to the MySQL database.

The function is barebones and uses the oldest approach of hidden inputs to maintain context between rendered forms using an HTML POST method. The hidden inputs are preceded with “h_” and snake case is used for variable names.

The function only writes to two tables. It writes to the member table and when that completes successfully to the contact table. The function:

• Submits credentials from a file and raises an error when they don’t work.
• Initializes a …

I recently learned of some odd behavior using MySQL BETWEEN operator queries, filtering by a DATETIME column. I wrote about this over on Medium so I am sharing the post for any readers here who are interested…

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The students needed yet another example of LEFT JOIN, RIGHT JOIN, and FULL JOIN syntax (by combining a left and right join with the UNION set operator). To that end, I put this set of examples together.

The example also shows how to order the result set from a derived table with the UNION operator. It uses the WITH clause to build a Common Table Expression (CTE), which allows the query to order the UNION set operator’s product based on the left and right join queries. It uses a CASE statement to order the result sets. The left_table is the parent table and the right_table is the child table in the relationship, which means the right_table holds a left_id foreign key column that lets you connect matching rows in the left_table.

You build the little model with the following …

I found myself explaining the nuances of INSERT statements and whether you should use named or positional notation. While the class was on Zoom, I could imagine the blank stares in the silence of my headphones. Then, I had to remind them about mandatory (NOT NULL constrained) and optional (nullable) columns in tables and how an INSERT statement requires an explicit NULL value for optional columns when the INSERT statement isn’t inserting a value into that column.

Then, I asked if somebody could qualify the different types of INSERT statements; and what would happen if a table with a first_name and last_name column order evolves when a new DBA decides to restructure the table and uses a last_name and first_name column order in the new table structure. Only a couple of the students recalled using a column-list …

During many decision-making phases in programming code (conditional logic), there are times execution depends on several different factors. Multiple conditional tests are powerful and constraining, oftentimes requiring more than one test to be passed in order for program flow to proceed. For MySQL (and standard SQL in general) the CASE expression is used for IF/THEN/ELSE conditional logic. The post, MySQL Simple CASE Expression – with examples, covered Simple CASE queries which are essentially equality tests. MySQL Simple CASE is but one variant of 2, with the other being a MySQL Searched CASE Expression.  A MySQL Searched CASE Expression can have multiple conditional tests in each WHEN …

Introduction In this article, I’m going to explain how we can index JSON columns when using MySQL. While other relational database systems provide GIN (Generalized Inverted Index) indexes, MySQL allows you to index a virtual column that mirrors the JSON path expression you are interested in indexing. Database table Let’s assume we have the following database book table: The properties column type is json, so we can store JSON objects as book properties. Querying MySQL JSON columns without an index If we try to filter one record by its associated title attribute... Read More

The post How to index JSON columns using MySQL appeared first on Vlad Mihalcea.

Programming logic is foundational in any application or piece of software. Without it, software wouldn’t really do much of anything. Everything happens off of choice. In the end, some truthy or falsy value is what makes stuff work. For IF/THEN/ELSE logic in standard SQL, there is the CASE expression. There are 2 variations of the CASE Expression: Simple and Searched. In this post, I cover the Simple MySQL CASE expression with example queries…

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Be it running reports or displaying data in some other visualization, SQL SELECT column expressions should be meaningful and understandable. To provide those valuable query results, SQL Developers, use a multitude of available functions, adjacent columns, or other means not readily apparent to end-users. All that being said, the column names often suffer the most as far as readability is concerned, taking on long function call names or other combined expressions. But, as luck would be on our side, there is an easy fix and that is aliasing columns using the AS keyword. Although AS is optional – in this particular context – I err on the side of readability and use it when aliasing SELECT column expressions.

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Each SQL dialect is different in some way, shape, form, or fashion from the next flavor. Some dialects have this function, while others have that function. In this post, I cover porting over Oracle SQL to MySQL in order to count the number of occurrences of a specific weekday found in the current given month (at the time of writing) purely as a learning exercise focused on MySQL DATE functions and the WITH clause…

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