Ryan Stille wrote:
> boll wrote:
>> Hello-
>>
>> I'm working with an unfamiliar application, trying to figure out
>> where my data is going.
>>
>> Is it possible to form a query to select from all the columns in
>> several tables at once? Something equivalent to:
>> SELECT FROM * WHERE * = 'john smith'; If that's not possible I'd
>> still like to be able to search each table at once without specifying
>> the column names:
>> SELECT FROM <table name> WHERE * = 'john smith';
>> If that can't be done, can a sub query find the column names to be
>> selected on?
>>
>> Basically, I'm trying to avoid doing separate selects on each column
>> in each table.
>>
>> This is using MySQL 5.0.27 .
>> Thanks for any suggestion or alternative methods!
>>
>> -John
>>
>
> SELECT * FROM table1, table2, table3 WHERE table1.name = 'john smith'
> AND table2.city = 'Dallas'
>
> If the tables have fields named the same, this may not work very
> well. Then you'd need to list out the column names and alias some of
> them so they come out with different names.
Yeah, that would be too complex to manage if the table structure changed.
>
> I don't think there is a way to wildcard the column names like you are
> asking, I can't imagine a case where you'd need to do that either.
> When would every column in your table have the same value? (john smith
> in your example).
At this point I'm just trying to figure out: Where in the database did
the input data get stored?
This, then, is how I need to approach it:
> You can programmatically get a list of columns in a table, then when
> you are using Perl or PHP or whatever to build your query string, you
> can loop through the columns to list them.
>
> -Ryan
Thanks, Ryan.
-John
