Below are examples of using some of the more popular RDBMSs to return the Unix timestamp.
The Unix timestamp (also known as Unix Epoch time, Unix time, or POSIX time) is the number of seconds that have elapsed since 00:00:00 Thursday, 1 January 1970, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
Continue readingSome RDBMSs provide an IFNULL() function that can be used when dealing with potentially null values. In particular, MySQL, MariaDB, and SQLite each have an IFNULL() function that replaces any null values with another value.
Other RDBMSs, such as SQL Server, Oracle, and PostgreSQL provide similar functionality via functions of a different name.
Continue readingIn MariaDB, the ISNULL() function checks whether an expression is null or not. If the expression resolves to null, then ISNULL() returns 1, otherwise it returns 0.
If you ever encounter a character column that should be numeric, there’s always a possibility that it contains non-numeric data that you don’t know about.
For example, someone might have set up a Price column as a varchar column that should have been a numeric column, and now you need to clean up after them. You might start by identifying all non-numeric data so that you can work out what to do with it before converting the column to a numeric type.
In SQL, you can run a query to return non-numeric data from the column. The query you use will largely depend on your DBMS.
Continue readingIf you have a column in a database table that contains character data, but some rows also contain numbers, you can use the following SQL queries to return just those rows that don’t contain numbers within the value.
Continue readingMost major RDBMSs support the NULLIF() operator, which returns NULL if both of its arguments are equivalent. If the arguments not equivalent, NULLIF() returns the first argument.
NULLIF() is a SQL-standard feature (it’s included in the ISO/IEC 9075 specification).
Most major RDBMSs support the COALESCE() operator, which returns the first non-null value from its list of arguments.
COALESCE() is a SQL-standard feature (it’s included in the ISO/IEC 9075 specification).
Sometimes you might need to search a database table for only those rows that contain at least one number in a given column.
Technically, numbers can be represented by words and other symbols, but here “number” means “numerical digit”.
Below are examples of how to find rows that contain at least one number in various SQL based DBMSs.
Continue readingIn MariaDB, the NULLIF() function returns NULL if both of its arguments are equivalent. Otherwise it returns the first argument.
Here are four options for returning rows that contain uppercase characters in MariaDB.
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