Question

I have 5 columns in a database table.

Column names are: English, French, German, Spanish, Russian.

I want to create select statement which searches for a word in the whole table (including all columns) instead of just one column, e.g.:

select * from language
where English = "Parrot"

The query above only searches “English” column for word “Parrot”.

I want a select statement which searches for “Parrot” in all columns.

How do I do that?

Answer 1

Beside the OR (I just fall in love with find_in_set)

select 
find_in_set('Parrot', 
  concat(English, ',', French, ',', German, ',', Spanish, ',', Russian)
) as pos
from language
having pos<>0

And the column pos can indicate which language match the search term.

However, normalize is the better solution