AdrianFRST

I need to seach all the columns in a table for a string. My code (simplified looks like):

SELECT * FROM products WHERE <columnname> LIKE '%memory%'

Is there a way of setting <columnname> to be any column in the table? Rather than having to do "productname LIKE '%memory%' OR prodcomment LIKE '%memory%' OR prodmfr LIKE..." etc?

TopBanana

You can't do that but you could use:

SELECT * FROM products WHERE column1+column2+column3 LIKE '%memory%'

Mark Jackson

Assuming your using Oracle, doesent matter, pretty much the same whatever you use,

use PL/SQL or VB to output the columns as a text string and do a text search on the string, theres loads of ways to do it if you use a bit of code.

do a Select * from table where col1 LIKE %memory% or col2 like %memory% or col3 etc etc.

AdrianFRST

Cheers for the help guys.

I'm using MySQL. I've done it in the code now. I was trying to be clever and make it so the search would include any new colums added to the table without having to modify the code.