Sometimes every occurance of a value which may be duplicated multiple times in a result set is not needed. For example, if making a pulldown menu list of options, each option should be seen only once. The DISTINCT keyword in a select statement eliminates duplication in the result set.

MySQL provides an easy mechanism for writing the results of a select statement into a text file on the server. Using extended options of the INTO OUTFILE nomenclature, it is possible to create a comma separated value (CSV) which can be imported into a spreadsheet application such as OpenOffice or Excel or any other applciation [...]

To get the PubDate element of an RSS feed to validate, it needs to be in RFC-822 format. MySQL has flexible ways of working with dates and times which make this a simple task.

Once you have selected a database, you can list the tables in it by using the show command.

When using innodb tables and foreign key constraints, importing a mysqldump can sometimes generate foreign key errors.

A frequent error message received when using the mysql command line utility is: Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/tmp/mysql.sock’ While this error message can be frustrating, the solution is simple.

If you don’t want to create your database from scratch it’s sometimes useful to just delete all the objects from it.

A very cool and powerful capability in MySQL and other databases is the ability to incorporate regular expression syntax when selecting data. The regular expresion support in MySQL is extensive. This recipe reviews regular expression use in MySQL and lists the supported regular expression metacharacters.

You want to select a completely random record from a table.

The SQL command in this recipe removes a column and the column’s data from an existing MySQL table.