Question

I have been searching for a while on a way to select certain columns (fields) in SQL.

What I am trying to do is this… Lets say I have a table with 200 columns of data. I want to select an entire row but only the last 197 columns of data. Leaving out the first 3 columns that have dates and ID’s.

It would be very time consuming to type out the 197 field names I wanted the data from. There has to be some easier way of doing it.

Any help or suggestions to point me in the correct direction?

Answer 1

If you are using MySQL, try something like this:

<?php
$query = "
SHOW COLUMNS FROM `Table` 
WHERE `Field` NOT LIKE 'rowtoignore1' 
AND `Field` NOT LIKE 'rowtoignore2' 
AND `Field` NOT LIKE 'rowtoignore3'
";

$r = mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());

$queryfields = "";

while($f = mysql_fetch_assoc($r)) { 
  $queryfields .= "`{$f['Field']}`,";
}

$queryfields = substr($queryfields,0,strlen($queryfields)-1);

$query = "SELECT {$queryfields} FROM `Table` WHERE xyz";
?>