In MySQL, the CASE statement can be used in stored programs to perform a complex conditional construct. It compares a list of conditions and returns a different result depending on which condition (if any) is matched.
The CASE statement is different to the CASE operator, in that the CASE statement is specifically for use in stored programs. Also, there’s a slight difference in the syntax.
In MySQL, the CASE operator compares a list of conditions and returns one of multiple possible result expressions.
The CASE expression is included in the SQL standard (ISO/IEC 9075), and most major RDBMSs support it.
MySQL also has the CASE statement, which is slightly different to the CASE operator. This article is about the CASE operator.
Some 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.
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.
If 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.
In SQL, the CASE statement evaluates a list of conditions and returns one of multiple possible result expressions.
In some ways, the SQL CASE statement is kind of similar to the IF...ELSE statement in that it allows us to check for a given condition and return a different result depending on the outcome.
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.