How do I do a simple 'Find and Replace" in MsSQL?

Question

Question is pretty self explanitory. I want to do a simple find and replace, like you would in a text editor on the data in a column of my database (which is MsSQL on MS Windows server 2003)

Answer 1

The following query replace each and every a character with a b character.

UPDATE      YourTable SET      Column1 = REPLACE(Column1,'a','b') WHERE      Column1 LIKE '%a%' 

This will not work on SQL server 2003.

Answer 2

like so:

BEGIN TRANSACTION;  UPDATE table_name   SET column_name=REPLACE(column_name,'text_to_find','replace_with_this');  COMMIT TRANSACTION; 

Example: Replaces <script... with <a ... to eliminate javascript vulnerabilities

BEGIN TRANSACTION; UPDATE testdb SET title=REPLACE(title,'script','a'); COMMIT TRANSACTION;