Retreiving only a part of a field..

[aguroyz]

hello,


is it possible to retrieve data but only a part of it in SQL??

or should I just retrieve it all and make php or something to truncate it?

Like for example I have a description field for my product table. I want to select only a summary of that description field, not the entire data.

Is this possible in SQL??

[r937]

absolutely, it's possible

have a look at the SUBSTRING function

[aguroyz]

but will it be a good practice to retrieve only a part of a long string instead of fetching it all in the database, where later on I will still have to retrieve it all in case the user clicks on the read more link????

[longneck]

well, HTTP is stateless. so if you retrieve the whole thing for later use, it's not going to be available anyway and you'll have to retrieve it again.