Question

Table structure:

Table: People

| Name | Skill1     | Skill2     | Skill3     | Skill4     | Skill5     |
| Tom  | Cooking    | Cleaning   | Eating     |            |            | 
| Jane | Typing     | Cooking    | Sleeping   | Flirting   |            |
| John | Tennis     |            |            |            |            |

Where there is no skill, it is just NULL.
For some reason I’m getting 0 results using the following SQL:

select Name from People
where Skill1 or Skill2 or Skill3 or Skill4 or Skill5 = 'Cooking';

I’d expect to see Tom and Jane… but I don’t, am I doing something wrong?

Answer 1

The shortest syntax may be this one:

select Name 
from People 
where 'Cooking' IN (
  Skill1,
  Skill2,
  Skill3,
  Skill4,
  Skill5);