SQL

I needed to create a query that did a case insensitive search using the LIKE command in MySQL and I quickly realised that in order to do this I would need to alter both the parameter and the table data to be the same case. This can be done by using the MySQL UPPER() command on the table data and the strtoupper() PHP function on the input data.

$name = strtoupper('phil');
$query = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE UPPER(forename) LIKE '" . $name . "%'";

This will produce the following SQL query.

SELECT * FROM users WHERE UPPER(forename) LIKE 'P%';

I hope that little tip comes in handy to someone looking for the same solution.

To round a number in MS SQL use the ROUND() function. This function takes two parameters, the first is the number to be rounded and the second is the number of decimal places to round the number to. Here is an example of rounding the numbers in a column to the nearest whole integer.

If you want to concatenate the output of three different columns in MS SQL just use the + symbol.

To limit the number of rows returned in a MS SQL query you need to use the TOP command. This goes before you name the columns that are to be returned by the SELECT statement.

The following query returns the first 35 rows from a table.

To get a random row from a Microsoft SQL database you need to use the NEWID() function. This will generate a new random number for each row and order them by that new number. This is used in conjunction with the TOP clause to limit the amount of returned rows to one.

SELECT TOP 1 value FROM table ORDER BY NEWID()