How do I prepend string to a field value in MySQL?

Question

I have a huge table of products from a specific vendor with a UPC column. I need to differentiate these products' UPCs from other vendors. The current idea is to prepend all of these UPCs with the letter a.

UPDATE abc_items SET upc = 'a' + upc

is basically how I imagine doing something like this, but I know it will not work.

Answer 1

Just use the CONCAT function.

CONCAT(str1,str2,...)

Returns the string that results from concatenating the arguments. May have one or more arguments. If all arguments are nonbinary strings, the result is a nonbinary string. If the arguments include any binary strings, the result is a binary string. A numeric argument is converted to its equivalent nonbinary string form.

UPDATE abc_items SET upc = CONCAT('k', upc)