Question

I have a client database that is in a pretty poor state, but I have to work with it. We have a set of product id’s and each id is made up of the attributes of the product. What i’d like to do is select those id’s that match the first 4 or 5 characters and have them in a drop down box as variants of a selected product.

I’ve tried ‘group by subtr(0,6)’, but this seems to return only the first match in the group. What I need is to have separate queries, that ONLY return ALL the individual rows that have a matching first x characters.

So, for example, I want to have queries that will return:
12345xx
12345yy
12345zz

and then another that will return:
56789xx
56789yy
56789zz

This following query would return only:

12345xx

and then

56789yy for example

select tbl_item.Description, tbl_item.`Description 2`, tbl_item.`Inventory Posting Group`, tbl_item.No_, tbl_item.`Web Description`, tbl_item.`Web Headers`, tbl_item.`Unit Price`, tbl_item.`Sales (Qty_)`, tbl_item.`Product Group Code`
from tbl_item
where tbl_item.`Product Group Code` = ':shopprodid' and tbl_item.`Vendor No_` = '$vendor_no'
group by substr(0,6)

Answer 1

The solution is to put the substr and LIKE in the WHERE clause (no need to group anything). And btw, in MySql the substring starts at index 1, not 0.

select *
from tbl_item
where substr(tbl_item.`Product Group Code`, 1, 6) LIKE ':shopprodid%'