Re: Getting length of longest value in a column

Get the DB to tell you the maximum length of the field. Assuming a well-trimmed varchar field called 'reason':

select max( len( reason ) ) from table;
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If the field is fixed length or can having space padding, then you'd need to trim them up. The functions for that tend to vary from DB to DB.

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Re^2: Getting length of longest value in a column by GrandFather (Saint) on Feb 20, 2012 at 20:52 UTC
Actually even len/length/char_length varies from DB to DB. Of the two I've worked with (SQLite and MySQL), one returns the number of bytes for length where the other returns the number of characters. Neither provide len. MySQL provides char_length in addition to length to return the character count. True laziness is hard work	[reply]