String Functions

In the previous chapters, we saw that text or string data is an important part of real-world database resources. SQL database products offer dedicated functions to handle and manipulate string data. As we'll see, this makes them useful in a SELECT clause. In addition, although the LIKE operator is not a string function, it searches for string patterns in other strings. This makes it incredibly useful in a WHERE clause. We'll see this as well. Since we can use string functions in SELECT statements and WHERE clauses, we can also use them in stored procedures, user-defined functions, and triggers. One example of a string function is the UPPER function. This function converts a string value into all uppercase characters. Consider the following query:

USE packt_online_shop;
SELECT ProductID, ProductName, UPPER(ProductName) AS 'UPPER CASE PRODUCT NAME'
FROM   Products;

Running the preceding code in the SQL query window yields the following output...