HELP Statement i INTEGER DEFAULT NULL ); Values shown for  actual time  in the output of this statement are expressed in milliseconds. 13.8.3 HELP Statement HELP ’ search_string ’ The  HELP  statement returns online information from the MySQL Reference Manual. Its proper operation requires that the help tables in the  mysql  database be initialized with help topic information (see Section 5.1.17, “Server-Side Help Support” ). The  HELP  statement searches the help tables for the given search string and displays the result of the search. The search string is not case-sensitive. The search string can contain the wildcard characters  %  and  _ . These have the same meaning as for pattern-matching operations performed with the  LIKE  operator. For example,  HELP ’rep%’  returns a list of topics that begin with  rep . The HELP statement understands several types of search strings: •At the most general level, use  contents  to retrieve a list of the top-level help categories: •For a list of topics in a given help category, such as  Data Types , use the category name: •For help on a specific help topic, such as the  ASCII()  function or the  CREATE TABLE  statement, use the associated keyword or keywords: HELP ’contents’ HELP ’data types’ HELP ’ascii’ HELP ’create table’ In other words, the search string matches a category, many topics, or a single topic. You cannot necessarily tell in advance whether a given search string returns a list of items or the help information for a single help topic. However, you can tell what kind of response  HELP  returned by examining the number of rows and columns in the result set. The following descriptions indicate the forms that the result set can take. Output for the example statements is shown using the familiar “tabular”  or “vertical”  format that you see when using the  mysql client, but note that  mysql  itself reformats  HELP  result sets in a different way. •Empty result set •Result set containing a single row with three columns • name : The topic name. • description : Descriptive help text for the topic. • example : Usage example or examples. This column might be blank. This means that the search string yielded a hit for the help topic. The result has three columns: No match could be found for the search string. 2986