At 04:10 PM 1/24/2002 -0500, Michael Stearne wrote: >We have a somewhat large read-only table (2.9 million recs). I am wonder >if there is a utility that will look at each row of each columns and come >up with a summary of the largest field (in character length) for each >column. For example, scan each row's firstname field and report that the >longest first name is 12 characters. That way I can ALTER the firstname >field to be a char or varchar of 12? What would be better BTW?
I don't know if CHAR or VARCHAR is better for you but as to the query here, it would seem easiest to write a short program to query all the rows and programatically determine the longest column length. That said, you could probably set up a SQL statement for it. There's a LENGTH function in SQL, isn't there? The statement would look SIMILAR to the following: SELECT MAX(LENGTH(t1.FIRSTNAME)) AS fnamelength FROM TableFoo t1, TableFoo t2 WHERE LENGTH(t2.FIRSTNAME) <= fnamelength; (Please note that my university SQL instructor pointed out that I wrote SQL statements backwards to anyone else he had ever taught. For that matter, I did Prolog backwards, too. :) --------------------------------------------------------------------- Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
