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Databases Reporting with SQL Working with Text Getting the Length of a String

Posted by Daniel Sparks
Daniel Sparks
2,695 Points

I am having trouble with the following prompt:

In the library database there's a books table with the columns id, title, author, genre and first_published.Find the book with the longest title. Show the title and then the length. Alias the result of the length calculation to be longest_length. Only retrieve the longest book.

the query which I thought would work is as follows:

SELECT title, LENGTH(title) AS longest_length FROM books DESC LIMIT 1;

I have also tried putting quotations around "longest_length" which does not seem to help. While this may be a simple misunderstanding on my end, any advice for how to proceed would be much appreciated.

1 Answer

KRIS NIKOLAISEN
KRIS NIKOLAISEN
54,971 Points
KRIS NIKOLAISEN
KRIS NIKOLAISEN
54,971 Points

You haven't named a column to sort by. Try ORDER BY longest_length DESC to get the title with the longest length.