methods of choosing fieldSet for a SELECT

sfullman

I know I can do either

SELECT *

SELECT field, field, field, etc.

Is there any other way to select groups of fields as a "field set" in mysql? Suppose for example I had a group of fields named response_% where % is the rest of the field. Any way to do this?

I won't hold my breath but this would sure be useful.

Sam Fullman
Compass Point Media

xblue

Hi Sam,

if you just want to save some keystrokes this probably would not be an option, however in case you really don't know the column names, the only way I can think of would be to do it in two parts, first getting the column names with SHOW, something like

SHOW COLUMNS FROM table LIKE 'response%'

then using these in your SELECT statement.

sfullman

that's disappointing, since if there's some convention about a table schema, this would allow for more efficent retrieval.

One other question would be, how would I do a full search of all columns without specifying them? CONCAT(*) doesn't work (it should in my opinion). This would allow me to search the entire table even though it may not always be an efficient search I realize.

Sam Fullman
Compass Point Media