shaun thornburgh wrote:
> I am trying to get all field names from my table that begin with
> letter X or Y, however the following statement and many variations I
> have tried produce an error:
>
> SHOW COLUMNS FROM TABLE LIKE "X%" OR LIKE "Y%"
According to the manual, the pattern for SHOW COLUMNS is:
SHOW [FULL] COLUMNS FROM tbl_name [FROM db_name] [LIKE 'pattern']
There is no WHERE clause or expression evaluation here, to achieve what
you want you must issue the statement twice:
SHOW COLUMNS FROM tbl_name LIKE "X%";
SHOW COLUMNS FROM tbl_name LIKE "Y%";
<URL: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/SHOW_COLUMNS.html >
You didn't ask, but a shorter way to write this is using the DESCRIBE
command, which can be abbreviated to DESC:
DESC tbl_name "X%";
DESC tbl_name "Y%";
<URL: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/DESCRIBE.html >
--
Roger
