What?
This is an article to document how to output the most frequently used words in a MySQL database column.

How?
Note this only applies to MySQL.

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Sometimes it is critical to ensure a group of queries are all executed successfully to maintain the integrity of our data. Let's say we have a banking app where we need to subtract funds from one account and add funds to another:

$mysqli->query ("UPDATE 'accounts' SET 'balance' = 'balance'-1000000 WHERE 'user' = 'Bob'");
$mysqli->query ("UPDATE 'accounts' SET 'balance' = 'balance'+1000000 WHERE 'user' = 'Fred'");

What if one of the queries fails? To mitigate the chances of misplacing our millions due to some possible error we must ensure that both queries are executed with the expected result before committing any changes to the data. This where transactions are useful. We can run the queries, then check if some conditions are met before committing the changes in the data:

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What?
A quick article on how to trim in MySQL along with getting rid of any leading or trailing tab characters.

Why?
I use MS Excel for organizing data and then converting to MySQL commands. Unfortunately, the MS Excel software adds tab characters to delimit the columns...

How?

UPDATE `mytable` SET `myColumn` = TRIM(CHAR(9) FROM TRIM(`myColumn`));

Source: Stack Overflow - How to Remove Tabs

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What?
A quick article showing my MySQL statement when I want to remove all the accents from foreign characters and return the English equivalent.

Why?
A content management system (CMS) that I'm working on has just gone international and started including the names of places in other countries. This is nice but its search engine doesn't work properly as it thinks "riviere" is different to "rivière". We need to ensure that a search for any of these kind of words will return results of similarly typed/sounding words.

How?
Here's just a splurge of SQL but I use this often enough:

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What?
A quick article on how to populate a database column from another table using a string comparison.

Why?
I have several database tables which replicate country names and I would rather they all use the ccTLD two letter code. This article was written because it took me so long to work it out.

How?

UPDATE  `table_to_update` a
        INNER JOIN `table_to_read` b
            ON a.`CountryName` COLLATE utf8_general_ci LIKE b.`CountryName` COLLATE utf8_general_ci
SET     a.`ccTLD` = b.`ccTLD` 

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Applies to:

• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2
• Microsoft SQL Server 2012

What?
These were in a solution and I thought I'd note them on my site so I can refer to them more easily.

How?

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