String concatenation in MySQL

Question

I am using MySQL and MySQL Workbench 5.2 CE. When I try to concatenate 2 columns, last_name and first_name, it doesn't work :

select first_name + last_name as "Name" from test.student

Answer 1

MySQL is different from most DBMSs use of + or || for concatenation. It uses the CONCAT function:

SELECT CONCAT(first_name, " ", last_name) AS Name FROM test.student

As @eggyal pointed out in comments, you can enable string concatenation with the || operator in MySQL by setting the PIPES_AS_CONCAT SQL mode.