MySQL CONCAT — a really handy function

I often use the MySQL string concatenation function concat. It is really awesome and makes my life easier. So I’ll take you through a couple of uses that I have found for it.

Making a full name out of a first and last…

MySQL Conditional Statements

Brief overview of how I have been known to use (abuse) MySQL conditional statements to achieve a beneficial outcome.

IF

IF is a nice and simple conditional statement. I use if to convert boolean values to something that the…

MyISAM — An old but still really useful storage engine

It’s been that INNODB has been the default MySQL storage engine for some years. For good reason, foreign keys and index level locking make it a lot more advanced. All of that functionality comes at a cost which is performance. Sadly…

MySQL date functions

Here is a little collection of my favourite MySQL functions for manipulating dates.

DATE_FORMAT

Ever since I discovered the DATE_FORMAT function in MySQL I have been addicted. It started with it’s intended use, which is something…

MySQL Prepared Statements

I recently developed a PHP script to export some denormalised data out of a set of MySQL tables. The original authors of the system we storing PHP serialised arrays in the database. The data inside that array was useful to me for the queries that I was performing. Now I could have…