Christopher Thompson wrote: > 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;
Looks good to me, thanks. Michael > > (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 > --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
