EXPERT RESPONSE
To set the stage for the answer, let's look at a couple of
exampes of the data in your column.
Because the column has the CHAR datatype, all values in the column
are "padded" with enough trailing spaces to fill out the entire 12
characters. Let's use the special character "§" to represent a space.
You said the values could be numeric 9 or numeric 12, which means that
the values in that column would look like this:
123456789§§§
111122223333
937937937§§§
Notice that the 9-digit numbers occupy the leftmost 9 characters of
the column, with trailing spaces.
The solution you're looking for, to extract the last two digits, can be
accomplished using the RIGHT string function. This is not a standard SQL
function, and not every database system has implemented it, but it works
in all the popular ones like Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, et cetera.
But before we can use RIGHT, we have to do something about those trailing spaces.
Standard SQL has the TRIM function, which is exactly what we need:
TRIM(TRAILING ' ' FROM column)
Again, popular database systems have all implemented a TRIM function,
all of which default to trimming spaces (if no other character is specified).
Some database systems allow you to use a function called RTRIM, which trims
from the right.
Putting both functions together, we get:
RIGHT(RTRIM(column),2)
This produces these results on our sample values:
89
33
37
Thus, in order to find values where the last two digits are 21, use:
SELECT ...
FROM ...
WHERE RIGHT(RTRIM(column),2) = '21'
SQL string functions can be nested, as shown.
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