I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong... Arrrgggg!!!

You need to get all the actors who's name starts with Tom so in the table of actors you have to query a certain column to check weather it starts with Tom. So for example if I had a table of students I would

SELECT * FROM students WHERE name_first LIKE 'Tom%'

See the difference? Your saying find in column 'actors' but actors is not a column, name is a column or password is a column. Hope this helps you figure out the correct answer.

Patrick Metcalfe

P.S. I would recommend putting more specific titles to your posts. It will help guide the right people to your question. "I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong" could require anyone from a ruby dev to a fortran dev to a html guy, being specific will speed up answer time!

It's not stupid at all. Just be patient and diligent and you'll amazingly start to wrap your brain around it all. I know I'm regularly re-watching videos over and over, and using other written resources to go along with the videos. With something that is so totally new to me as MySQL, I'm probably watching a video (as short as they are) at least a couple times before I even bother with the corresponding quiz.

On to it.

You have two tables in the database. They are 'movies' and 'actors'. After selecting from the 'movies' table in the first three challenges, you'll be selecting from the 'actors' table for this fourth . So the beginning of your query will be:

SELECT * FROM actors

Cool. You did that a few videos ago. Now, you're looking for actors whose name starts with Tom. ('name' is the name of our column) So:

SELECT * FROM actors WHERE name LIKE "Tom%";

One trick I found helpful since this forum doesn't have a search function that I know of, is to copy a quiz or challenge question, (highlight and then ctrl-c), then go to google and paste it in the search box. Someone posted on here that they add the word 'treehouse' to the search.

I've had to google the questions sometimes too... I felt bad at first but I actually read what I find instead of just getting the answer so I'm learning what I missed anyways! Great stuff on here!