WHERE ... LIKE

Before explaining how LIKE works it's good to know how the wildcharacter works in the SQL. The wildcharacter is a percentagesign, '%', and works sort of like you expect the '*', asterix, sign to work. If you search for '%ty' you're searching for everything that ends with 'ty', like Party, Marty or Patty. Searching for '%oo%' searches for everything that starts with something(anything), continues with 'oo' and ends with anything, like Pool, Cool or Powertool.

Now, the wildcharacter is used in conjunction with the LIKE keyword.

This will be our table 'person'

|--------------------+--------------------+--------------------|

|Name                |Age                 |Gender              |

|____________________+____________________+____________________|

|Bob                  34                   Male                |

|Silvia               67                   Female              |

|Magnus               24                   Male                |

|Lisa                 32                   Female              |

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

Syntax:

SELECT column
FROM table_name
WHERE column LIKE condition

Example:

SELECT *

FROM person

WHERE Name LIKE '%i%'

|--------------------+--------------------+--------------------|

|Name                |Age                 |Gender              |

|____________________+____________________+____________________|

|Silvia               67                   Female              |

|Lisa                 32                   Female              |

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

Example 2:

SELECT *

FROM person

WHERE Age LIKE '3%'

|--------------------+--------------------+--------------------|

|Name                |Age                 |Gender              |

|____________________+____________________+____________________|

|Bob                  34                   Male                |

|Lisa                 32                   Female              |

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

As we can see, even with Integers we need to write the condition within '´s.

You can of course, also use NOT LIKE if you want to:

Example 2:

SELECT *

FROM person

WHERE Age NOT LIKE '3%'

|--------------------+--------------------+--------------------|

|Name                |Age                 |Gender              |

|____________________+____________________+____________________|

|Silvia               67                   Female              |

|Magnus               24                   Male                |

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

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