How to select data items of a certain length?

Question

How do I select the row of a column such that the row size is <= 5 ? Is there a query for this which will work on most/all databases ?

eg. id, first_name

Select only those people whose firstname is more than 10 characters. Their name is too long ?

Answer 1

If you are bound to use a specific RDBMS then the solution is easy.

Use the LENGTH function.

Depending upon your database the length function can be LEN, Length, CarLength. Just search google for it.

According to your question

How do I select the row of a column such that the row size is <= 5 ? Is there a query for this which will work on most/all databases ?

solution can be

SELECT * FROM TableName WHERE LENGTH(name) <= 5

If you want something that can work with almost all the database and I assume that the length of your string that you want to fetch is of a significant small length. Example 5 or 8 characters then you can use something like this

 SELECT * 
 FROM tab
 WHERE
    colName LIKE ''
 OR colName LIKE '_' 
 OR colName LIKE '__'
 OR colName LIKE '___'
 OR colName LIKE '____'
 OR colName LIKE '_____'

This works with almost all major DBMS.

see example:

SQL Server

MySQL

Oracle

Postgre SQL

SQLite