Beginning SQL

If you put square brackets around it (as shown below), the database system is happy:
SELECT DateOfBirth AS [One***Two] FROM MemberDetails;
That covers concatenation in MS Access and SQL Server; now it’s time to look at Oracle and DB2’s way
of concatenating.
Oracle and IBM DB2
There are two ways of concatenating text data or text-based columns in Oracle and DB2. The first is to
use the concatenation operator, which in these systems is two vertical pipe (||) characters (see the following
statement). The second is to use the CONCAT() function, which is covered later in this section.
SELECT FirstName || ‘ ‘ || LastName AS FullName FROM MemberDetails;
The preceding SQL returns the following results:
FullName
Katie Smith
Susie Simons
John Jackson
Steve Gee
John Jones
Jenny Jones
Jack Johnson
Seymour Botts
Jamie Hills
Stuart Dales
William Doors
Doris Night
As with SQL Server, not only can you join columns, but you can also join text. In the preceding example,
you added a space between the first name and last name to improve readability; otherwise, results
would have been KatieSmith, SandraTell, and so on. When you join columns, you can add whatever text
you wish, as shown in the following statement:
SELECT ‘First name is ‘ || FirstName || ‘, last name is ‘ || LastName FullName
FROM MemberDetails;
The preceding code produces these results:
Extracting Information
85