1. MySQL, update column by using regexp

I want to update the values of a MySQL column, e.g. from:
http://www.example.com/news/ent//news/2002/09/02/ent-12.html?page=1223
to:
http://www.example.com/news/2002/09/02/ent-12.html?page=1223
For a huge table, if using:

1. $ mysqldump -u user -p database table > dump.sql
2. $ find /path/to/dump.sql -type f -exec sed -i ‘s/old_string/new_string/g’ {} ;
3. $ mysqlimport -u user -p database table < dump.sql

It would make processing complex and easy to occur errors. My solution is very simple: just using MySQL’s substring(), concat(), they works very well: it takes around 10 seconds to process tens of thousands data.

update contents
 set url=concat('http://www.example.com', substring(url,39))
  where createdby='gossip.cgi'

2. MySQL merge 2 tables

I have 2 MySql tables which have the same structure/indexes/unique index, each have tens of thousands data, and want to merge table2 into table1. The following is my way:

insert ignore into table1
  select * from table2;

I remember Oracle PL/SQL has the same syntax with MySQL for this kind of merge.