SELECT N rows before and after the row matching the condition?

Question

The behaviour I want to replicate is like grep with -A and -B flags . eg grep -A 2 -B 2 \"hello\" myfile.txt will give me all the lines wh

Answer 1

Don't know if this is at all valid MySQL but how about

SELECT  t.* 
FROM    theTable t
        INNER JOIN (
          SELECT id FROM theTable where message like '%hello%'
        ) id ON id.id <= t.id
ORDER BY
        ID DESC
LIMIT   3                    
UNION ALL 
SELECT  t.* 
FROM    theTable t
        INNER JOIN (
          SELECT id FROM theTable where message like '%hello%'
        ) id ON id.id > t.id
ORDER BY
        ID
LIMIT   2