LIKE

The LIKE operator provides an easy way to search records with the different patterns in a column. We can use wildcards characters in a query to build various patterns. There are basically two kinds of wildcard which are mostly use. Let's see each of them with the example.

• % (Percentage): Use this wildcard to search zero or more occurrences of any character. Suppose if we want to search users whose username starts with 'a' then we can use this wildcard just like below query.

select * from users where username like 'a%';

In case where we want to search users whose username starts from 'a' and ends with 's' then the query with % wildcard will be like this.

select * from user where username like 'a%s';

• _ (Underscore): Use this wildcard where we want to search records with the pattern where any character can take place where we have specified underscore (_). Suppose we want to search users whose username ends with dmin and we are not sure about the first character. Hence below query will search results whose username's first character can be any but it should end with dmin.

select * from users where username like '_dmin';

Make sure that it would consider exactly one character for one underscore. Hence in this case user with username as "aadmin" will not be considered because query has mentioned only one wildcard character with the underscore.