Welcome to the Treehouse Community

Want to collaborate on code errors? Have bugs you need feedback on? Looking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project? Get support with fellow developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels here with the Treehouse Community! While you're at it, check out some resources Treehouse students have shared here.

Looking to learn something new?

Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today.

Start your free trial

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

Unable to solve...

What's the answer here?

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.

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,269 Points

Please show your complete query code here to make it possible for us to give you a specific answer.

1 Answer

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,269 Points

Here's a few generic hints:

  • use ORDER BY with DESCending to get the the largest numbers first
  • use LIMIT to control how many records to show
  • remember to use the alias on the field created by the function

If you're still having trouble, show your complete query code here.

Is this what you meant by showing my complete query code? Here's what I had put down as my code:

SELECT first_name || " " || last_name || " " || < || email || > || AS "to_field" FROM patrons;

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,269 Points

That looks like code for a completely different challenge!

That query is creating email headers from a "patrons" table, but this challenge is about finding the longest book title in a "books" table,