Querying a string from int column?

Question

I have a table:

CREATE TABLE `ids` (
    id int(11) not null auto_increment,
    PRIMARY KEY (id)
);

It contains some IDs: 111, 112, 113, 1

Answer 1

One option is to CAST the 112 to CHAR to get a proper match:

WHERE CAST(id AS CHAR(12)) = '112abcdefg'

The 12 in CHAR is a guess; it should be large enough for your biggest id.

That will probably kill any chance of optimization, so another option (though one I'm not 100% sure of) is to use a BINARY comparison. I've tried this with a few different values and it works:

WHERE BINARY id = '112abcdefg'