Intro to SQL Cont’d

Concatenation – In More detail

• You can find a list of string related functions

at this link:
– http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/stri
ng-functions.html
• concat and concat_ws are are two key
functions that we will use
• Both the functions deal with the concatenation
of strings
• What is the difference between the two?
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 Concatenation
• CONCAT() returns NULL if any argument is
NULL. The example shows the concatenation
of string literals.

Concatenation
• CONCAT_WS() stands for Concatenate With Separator
and is a special form of CONCAT().
• The first argument is the separator for the rest of the
arguments.
• The separator can be anything like a space, for
instance
• The separator is added between the strings to be
concatenated.
• The separator can be a string, as can the rest of the
arguments.
• If the separator is NULL, the result is NULL.
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 Concatenation
• CONCAT_WS() does not skip empty strings.
• However, it does skip any NULL values after the
separator argument.

• For the above, what is the result with concat?

• So which function should you use?
– You can use either.
– However, concat_ws is more useful when you deal
with null values 5

Concat Example - How can I combine the first

name and last name?

• Use the CONCAT function in MySQL (look at the

column names in the output).
• What will be the solution with concat_ws?

• MS Access

• SELECT cus_code, cus_fname & " " &

cus_lname FROM CUSTOMER; 6

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 Concat Example - How can I combine the first
name and last name?
• What happens if you use the & or + operator
instead of the concatenate functions in MySql?
• For instance, what would be the result of the
following query in MySql?
– SELECT cus_code, cus_fname & " " &
cus_lname FROM CUSTOMER;
– SELECT cus_code, cus_fname + " " +
cus_lname FROM CUSTOMER;

• Try out these queries in your own time and note

the results. 7

Aliases (As)
• An alias can be used in a query select list, to
give a column a different name.
• Use the AS operator to create an alias
• You can use the alias in GROUP BY, ORDER
BY, or HAVING clauses to refer to the column:

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 Aliases (as)
• Standard SQL disallows references to column aliases in a
WHERE clause.
• This restriction is imposed because when the WHERE
clause is evaluated, the column value may not yet have
been determined.
• For example, the following query is illegal:

• The WHERE clause determines which rows should be

included in the GROUP BY clause,
– but it refers to the alias of a column value that is not known until
after the rows have been selected, and grouped by the GROUP
BY.
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Aliases (as)
• In the select list of a query, a quoted column alias can be
specified using identifier or string quoting characters
– SELECT 1 AS `one`, 2 AS 'two';
• Elsewhere in the statement, quoted references to the alias
must use identifier quoting, or the reference is treated as a
string literal.
• For example, this statement groups by the values in column
id, referenced using the alias `a`:
– SELECT id AS 'a', COUNT(*) AS cnt FROM tbl_name
GROUP BY `a`;
• But this statement groups by the literal string 'a' and will not
work as expected:
– SELECT id AS 'a', COUNT(*) AS cnt FROM tbl_name
GROUP BY 'a';
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 Aliases example
• https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/problems-with-
alias.html (MySql 5.1 reference for As)
• The example below gives the full name generated with concat
using an alias called Name

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Aliases Exercise 1
• Consider the following columns in a customer table:

• Write a query to show all the details of all the customers from the table
above
• Consider the customer code to be a number
• cus_code should be aliased as Customer Code (two words).
• The first and last names should be concatenated such that they are not
nullified by null entries of the first/last name with the alias FullName.
• Spend about 1-2 minutes on this (answer is on the next slide)
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• How many solutions are possible?

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 Aliases Exercise 1 - Solution
• Consider the following columns in a customer table:

• select cus_code as 'Customer Code', concat_ws(' ', cus_fname,

cus_lname) as FullName from customer;
– OR
• select cus_code as `Customer Code`, concat_ws(' ', cus_fname,
cus_lname) as FullName from customer;
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• Note the difference in the solutions.

Arithmetic Operators
• A list of arithmetic operators are given below

• If any of the operands of a +, -, /, *, % is a real or string value, the precision of

the result is the precision of the operand with the maximum precision.
• In division performed with /, the scale of the result when using two exact-value
operands is the scale of the first operand plus the value of the
div_precision_increment system variable (which is 4 by default).
• For example, the result of the expression 5.05 / 0.014 has a scale of six decimal
places (360.714286)
• https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/arithmetic-functions.html (see the link for
full details)
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 Using Calculations - Example
• Consider the line table below

• List the invoice number, product code, and the total value of sales of that
product (line qty * line price) - Use arithmetic operators 15

Using Calculations - Example

• List the invoice number, product code, and the
total value of sales of that product (line qty *
line price). The product is the line_total

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 IFNULL
• Control Flow Functions

• Sometimes we need to control the flow of statements and the result

that is returned based on some condition

• For instance, if a particular value is null, we may wish to return some

expression instead of a null value.

• We consider one such function as follows:

• IFNULL(expr1,expr2)

– Expr1 is expression 1 and expr2 is expression 2

– If expr1 is not NULL, IFNULL() returns expr1; otherwise it returns expr2.

– IFNULL() returns a numeric or string value, depending on the context in

which it is used.

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IFNULL
• Some examples can be seen as follows:

• The default result value of IFNULL(expr1,expr2) is the more “general” of the

two expressions, in the order STRING, REAL, or INTEGER.

• Consider the case of a table based on expressions or where MySQL must

internally store a value returned by IFNULL() in a temporary table:

• There will be a data row with the test field having the value 1
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 Special Operators
• A list of different operators is given at the link below:
– https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/non-typed-
operators.html

• Some key operators of significance

• BETWEEN

• LIKE

• IS NOT NULL

• IS NULL

• IS NOT

• IS
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• NOT

Special Operators - Between

• The BETWEEN operator selects values within a range.
• The values can be numbers, text, or dates.
• You can use BETWEEN clause to replace a combination of "greater than equal
AND less than equal" conditions.
• See the example below and the output results
• Between:
– Select the customer codes and names for those customers whose
balance is between 200 and 400

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 Special Operators – IS NULL

• IS NULL
– Checks whether a particular column is null.
• Example: select all customers who do not have
a middle name

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Special Operators - LIKE

• Like
– used when we want to match a particular pattern
– Pattern matching is done using SQL simple regular expression
comparison.
– Returns 1 (TRUE) or 0 (FALSE).
– The pattern need not be a literal string.

• For example, it can be specified as a string expression or table

column.
• This is used when we don’t have a particular value to compare with
but we have an idea of the value.
• The full reference is given here
• https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/string-comparison-
functions.html#operator_like
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 Special Operators - LIKE
• With LIKE you can use the following two wildcard characters in the
pattern.

• To test for literal instances of a wildcard character, precede it by the

escape character.
• If you do not specify the ESCAPE character, “\” is assumed.

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Special Operators - LIKE

• Like
– Example: List the customers whose last name
starts with the letter ‘O’
– Note the use of % - this means any value of
any length can come after ‘O’

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 Special Operators - LIKE
• Like
– like ‘_m%’ means that the second letter
of the last name should be ‘m’ followed
by anything else

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Special Operators - LIKE

• Like
– Like is a very useful operator overall
– For instance, if we need to search for the title
of a particular book in a database, we may not
wish to type the whole title but part of it in
the search
– Similarly, if we searched by the author name,
we might just wish to get a set of results after
writing only part of the author’s name
– Think about how searches in Google happen.
– You only type part of the search and Google
yields invaluable results
– Think about other situations where you could
use LIKE in your queries 26

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 Special Operators - IN
• expr IN (value list)

• Returns 1 if expr (expression) is equal to any of the

values in the IN list, else returns 0.
• IN is very quick if the IN value list consists entirely of
constants.
• This is an important operator when you want to get all
the rows in a table whose column value is in some
known list
• For instance, finding all customers in a list of cities.
– You can check if the customer city is in one from a given
list of cities, instead of checking as a combination of 27
expressions

Special Operators - IN

• IN
– Allows you to specify a list of values
– Consider the invoice table

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 Special Operators - IN

• Select the invoice numbers of those invoices

that were made for the customer with cus_code
10018, 10012, 10014

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Joining Database Tables

• How can you retrieve data from • The following tables show the
multiple tables? relationship between Product
• Tables should be related and Vendor
• You should know the PK and FK • What is the foreign key?
• You can put the join condition in
the WHERE clause
• There are different kinds of
joins, each with a different
purpose
• Think about a query where you
have to find the number of
products by a particular vendor.
• You need to locate the vendor
from the vendor table and find
matches of products with the
same vendor to get a count 30

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 Joining Database Tables
• The product table has the v_code only
• How can you list the product and the name of the
vendor?
• The name of the vendor is the vendor table
• You need to join the two tables together
• You will do this using the foreign key in the table
design
• You will need a join query to combine the info
from both tables

• The full reference for joins is located at:

– https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/jo
in.html
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Joining Database Tables

• One of the ways of joining tables is to make
selections of attributes from the respective tables
and use a where clause to filter the required rows
• Other ways joining info from different tables is to
use clauses such as INNER JOIN, LEFT JOIN, RIGHT
JOIN
• The above clauses can be convenient, but
sometimes difficult to write
• Another possibility is to use sub queries (a query
within a query)
• Be sure to see the full MySql 5.1 join reference
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 Joining Database Tables

• So how can we join info from different tables?

• We first have to understand what happens if we just
join 2 tables without any filter restrictions
• If you write a query such as
– select table1.a1, table2.b1 from table1, table2;
• You will get a cartesian product which will pair up every
value of a1 with every value of b1 from the second table
• Let’s just consider an example on the next slide with the
following tables:
– Student
– Guardian

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Joining Database Tables

• The student and guardian tables are follows (student on the left):

• If we write the query (w/o any filter clause), the results will be:
– select student.stu_id, guardian.guard_id from student, guardian order
by student.stu_id;

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 Joining Database Tables

• Now, if we write the query (with some filter clause), the results will
be:
– select student.stu_id, guardian.guard_id from student, guardian where
student.stu_id = "S1" order by student.stu_id ;

• All the rows were filtered to only include records for S1, but still
creating all permutations of S1 with every row in the guardian table

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Joining Database Tables - Example

• Let’s look at this example

• List the p_code, p_descript, v_code, v_name for all
products.
• So how can we do this?
• Essentially include each attribute in the query and
specify the tables from which the selections are being
made (prouct and vendor)
• Then you can use a filter clause with where

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 Joining Database Tables

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Joining Database Tables

• product.v_code = vendor.v_code;

• This statement creates a natural join between

product and vendor tables

• The statement only picks the those rows where

the v_code value in the product table matches
the v_code value of the vendor table

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Joining Database Tables – Exercise 1

• Exercise:

• List the p_code, p_descript, v_code,

v_name for all products that is supplied by
vendor with v_code = 21344.

• Spend about 1 minute on this question

(solution on the next slide)

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Joining Database Tables – Exercise 1

• List the p_code, p_descript, v_code, v_name

for all products that is supplied by vendor with
v_code = 21344.
• Solution

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Joining Database Tables – Exercise 2

• Write the condition that joins the customer

and invoice table. Spend about a minute on
this (work this out yourself)

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References

• https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/contro
l-flow-functions.html#function_ifnull
• http://www.tutorialspoint.com/mysql/mysql-
between-clause.htm
• https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/string-
comparison-functions.html#operator_like
• https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/comp
arison-operators.html#function_in

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