JOEL LIPMAN Systems / Automation / AI

Knowledge base / Since 1999

Databases Tutorials & Guides

Practical Databases tutorials, troubleshooting notes and implementation guides from real projects.

Advanced search

75 entries / Databases

Clear filters
Regular Expressions in SQL
Databases

Regular Expressions in SQL

Practice makes perfect. Or in my case, any practice is a start. This article serves as a quick note on how to use regular expressions within SQL statements: How? For the following examples, I am pretending to select rows from a table called `STUDENTS`.

Read note 25,305 hits
Generate a Timesheet in MySQL
MySQL

Generate a Timesheet in MySQL

This article is to remind me how to create a blank weekly timesheet which reads the duration of events from a database and auto-completes your timesheet.

Read note 34,575 hits
Compare two databases using T-SQL
Transact-SQL

Compare two databases using T-SQL

A quick article on how to compare two Microsoft databases using the tools provided with SQL Server and without having to download any third-party products.

Read note 34,121 hits
MySQL: Find all non-alphanumeric rows
MySQL

MySQL: Find all non-alphanumeric rows

Quick note on how to do this. I was tasked with cleaning up an english database by replacing all special alphabets (ë to e) and non-alphanumeric symbols with URL friendly characters. How? -- return all records that contain non-alphanumeric characters SELECT * FROM myTable WHERE myColumn NOT REGEXP '^[A-Za-z0-9]+$'...

Read note 21,810 hits
SQL: Use CASE for Relevance column
MySQL

SQL: Use CASE for Relevance column

So this is a quick note to myself as I was playing with the relevance heuristics of a query. This example adds a column of relevance and sorts the rows accordingly. How? This has to be a real quick one for a dropdown search field which has to find relevant terms to autofill/autocomplete a search form: -- where @ThisSea...

Read note 12,816 hits
Modifying columns in a table
Databases

Modifying columns in a table

This is an article to remind me how to modify a column in a database table the old fashioned way (as in stop making me use GUI interfaces so poorly programmed when even I've made better DBMS tools). All SQL -- Add a column to an existing table (giving it datatype char(2) and allowing NULL) ALTER TABLE myTable ADD myCol...

Read note 17,390 hits
Reorder Columns in a Table
Databases

Reorder Columns in a Table

Just a quick note to myself on how to reorder columns as I was having difficulty using a phpMyAdmin interface to do this. How? Taken from the best forum for programming Qs&As: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4095481/easy-way-to-re-order-columns Method: phpMyAdmin So in the phpMyAdmin interface, apparently, you can d...

Read note 33,560 hits

Working principle

Our Purpose

This site exists as a practical knowledge base built from real-world experience across systems, platforms, and technologies since 1999. Much of the content documents solutions, edge cases, and working patterns that were learned through investigation where documentation was incomplete or absent, and is shared to reduce the same friction for others.

27 Years in IT
1021 CRM clients
810 Site articles
29.7m+ Reads / hits

Knowledge base

Search notes

Find matching words in article titles and content.