This is absolutely a bad practice, I know, but it’s an abandoned project from a previous developer and I need to keep using the same structure.

Basically, there’s a table which has to be edited every year by adding a new column like: year_2023, year_2024, year_2025, year_2026 and so on, and someone already takes care of it.

This is DEFINITELY a bad approach and will clog the table with a large amount of columns over time, but I need to create a function which depends on ALL these columns (if they exist or not).

Let’s make a pratical example. I know I could simply do:

SELECT * FROM table WHERE year_2023 != '0000-00-00' OR year_2024 != '0000-00-00' OR year_2025 != '0000-00-00' OR year_2026 = != '0000-00-00'

To select, AT THE CURRENT STATE, all the columns which have a date set in such columns, but I wouldn’t want, next year, to edit this query by adding:

... OR year_2027 = != '0000-00-00'

So my question is, is there a way to loop through the year columns, and eventually stop looping once they find the first non-existing column?

As, if year_2027 doesn’t exist (yet), there would be no need to keep iterating to all years, so year_2028 and so on wouldn’t need to be checked as they won’t exist as well.