MariaDB CASE Operator

In MariaDB, we can use the CASE operator to compare a list of conditions and return a different result depending on which condition (if any) is matched.

The CASE expression is included in the SQL standard (ISO/IEC 9075), and most major RDBMSs support it.

MariaDB also has the CASE statement, which is slightly different to the CASE operator. This article is about the CASE operator.

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Find All Non-Numeric Values in a Column in SQL

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.

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SQL CASE Statement

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.

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