Interactive SQL Tutorial

5. Using LIKE

Employee Address Table
SSN	FirstName	LastName	Address	City	State
512687458	Joe	Smith	83 First Street	Howard	Ohio
758420012	Mary	Scott	842 Vine Ave.	Losantiville	Ohio
102254896	Sam	Jones	33 Elm St.	Paris	New York
876512563	Sarah	Ackerman	440 U.S. 110	Upton	Michigan

Look at the EmployeeStatisticsTable, and say you wanted to see all people whose last names started with "L"; try:

SELECT EMPLOYEEIDNO

FROM EMPLOYEEADDRESSTABLE

WHERE LASTNAME LIKE 'L%'

The percent sign (%) is used to represent any possible character (number, letter, or punctuation) or set of characters that might appear after the "L". To find those people with LastName's ending in "L", use '%L', or if you wanted the "L" in the middle of the word, try '%L%'. The '%' can be used for any characters in the same position relative to the given characters. NOT LIKE displays rows not fitting the given description. Other possiblities of using LIKE, or any of these discussed conditionals, are available, though it depends on what DBMS you are using; as usual, consult a manual or your system manager or administrator for the available features on your system, or just to make sure that what you are trying to do is available and allowed. This disclaimer holds for the features of SQL that will be discussed below. This section is just to give you an idea of the possibilities of queries that can be written in SQL.

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