Count the number of occurrences of a string in a VARCHAR field?

try this:

 select TITLE,
        (length(DESCRIPTION )-length(replace(DESCRIPTION ,'value','')))/5 as COUNT 
  FROM <table> 

SQL Fiddle Demo

A little bit simpler and more effective variation of @yannis solution:

SELECT 
    title,
    description,    
    CHAR_LENGTH(description) - CHAR_LENGTH( REPLACE ( description, 'value', '1234') ) 
        AS `count`    
FROM <table> 

The difference is that I replace the "value" string with a 1-char shorter string ("1234" in this case). This way you don't need to divide and round to get an integer value.

Generalized version (works for every needle string):

SET @needle = 'value';
SELECT 
    description,    
    CHAR_LENGTH(description) - CHAR_LENGTH(REPLACE(description, @needle, SPACE(LENGTH(@needle)-1))) 
        AS `count`    
FROM <table> 

This should do the trick:

SELECT 
    title,
    description,    
    ROUND (   
        (
            LENGTH(description)
            - LENGTH( REPLACE ( description, "value", "") ) 
        ) / LENGTH("value")        
    ) AS count    
FROM <table>