SQL for MySQL Developers: A Comprehensive Tutorial and Reference

Appendix B. Scalar Functions

MySQL supports many scalar functions. For all functions, this appendix presents the name, a description, the data type of the result of the function, and a few examples. The functions are sorted by name.

Some functions have more than one name. To make the search easier, we have included them all, but we refer to the functions with the same name.

Note that MySQL has two data types that form a combination of a date and a time: the datetime and timestamp. If a function can work with timestamps, it can usually work with datetimes, too, and the other way round. For the sake of convenience, this appendix considers these data types to be synonyms. If you come across “timestamp” somewhere in the appendix, you actually must ...