LIKE in SQL Server: search text

LIKE is pattern match on text. % means any string. _ means one character. People use it for “name contains”.

Contains, starts with

SELECT customer_id, first_name, last_name, email
FROM Customers
WHERE last_name LIKE 'Ash%'          -- starts with Ash
   OR email LIKE '%@harbour.co';     -- ends with that domain

Leading %

LIKE '%son' cannot use a normal index well. Fine on Customers. Painful on ten million log rows. If you do it every morning, talk about full-text or a computed last-four column.

To search for a real % character, use ESCAPE or LIKE '%[%]%'.

Try it on Harbour & Co

Amy Nair (Finance Lead) needs this now: “Mailing list for the newsletter. Some names have stray spaces and emails have capitals. Clean it, no duplicates.” Write the query, run it, send the results. On the paid plan.

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