SQL tutorialsfor Business Analyst SQL| Wildcard Operators

We have already discussed about the SQL LIKE operator, which is used to compare a value to similar values using the wildcard operators.

SQL supports two wildcard operators in conjunction with the LIKE operator which are explained in detail in the following table.

The percent sign represents zero, one or multiple characters. The underscore represents a single number or a character. These symbols can be used in combinations.

Syntax

The basic syntax of a ‘%’ and a ‘_’ operator is as follows.

SELECT * FROM table_name
WHERE column LIKE 'XXXX%'

or 

SELECT * FROM table_name
WHERE column LIKE '%XXXX%'

or

SELECT * FROM table_name
WHERE column LIKE 'XXXX_'

or

SELECT * FROM table_name
WHERE column LIKE '_XXXX'

or

SELECT * FROM table_name
WHERE column LIKE '_XXXX_'

You can combine N number of conditions using the AND or the OR operators. Here, XXXX could be any numeric or string value.

Example

The following table has a number of examples showing the WHERE part having different LIKE clauses with ‘%’ and ‘_’ operators.

Let us take a real example, consider the CUSTOMERS table having the following records.

+----+----------+-----+-----------+----------+
| ID | NAME     | AGE | ADDRESS   | SALARY   |
+----+----------+-----+-----------+----------+
|  1 | Ramesh   |  32 | Ahmedabad |  2000.00 |
|  2 | Khilan   |  25 | Delhi     |  1500.00 |
|  3 | kaushik  |  23 | Kota      |  2000.00 |
|  4 | Chaitali |  25 | Mumbai    |  6500.00 |
|  5 | Hardik   |  27 | Bhopal    |  8500.00 |
|  6 | Komal    |  22 | MP        |  4500.00 |
|  7 | Muffy    |  24 | Indore    | 10000.00 |
+----+----------+-----+-----------+----------+

The following code block is an example, which would display all the records from the CUSTOMERS table where the SALARY starts with 200.

SQL> SELECT * FROM CUSTOMERS
WHERE SALARY LIKE '200%';

This would produce the following result.

+----+----------+-----+-----------+----------+
| ID | NAME     | AGE | ADDRESS   | SALARY   |
+----+----------+-----+-----------+----------+
|  1 | Ramesh   |  32 | Ahmedabad |  2000.00 |
|  3 | kaushik  |  23 | Kota      |  2000.00 |
+----+----------+-----+-----------+----------+

SQL tutorialsfor Business Analyst SQL| Wildcard Operators

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