Start: (‘abc%’)

Ever heard of “Osmosis”? You know, the…

process of gradual or unconscious assimilation of ideas, knowledge, etc.

For the longest time, that was how I thought people learned in SQL Server. You hang around a technology for long enough and the information about it slowly trickles into your brain.

I would hazard that the vast majority of people learn like this. They work with something long enough and slowly they develop, if not a mastery of the subject, then a familiarity with it.

That’s how I learned Transact-SQL anyway.
Working in a help desk, trouble-shooting stored procedures and ad hoc statements; cranking out reports left, right and center, slowly absorbing the differences between INNER, LEFT, RIGHT, and FULL joins. Realizing that there is a vast difference between excluding results with a WHERE clause and with a HAVING clause.

Ahh good times!

However, now I’m in the mindset that if you really want to learn something then study it; purposefully and deliberately.

And with all the new features being released for SQL Server 2016, you would be amazed at what I can learn about features that were released in SQL Server 2008.

So here’s some little known facts I learned about LIKE

Middle: (‘%lmnop%’)

Safe to say, that we’ve all used LIKE, we’ve all seen LIKE, and we’re probably all going to continue to use LIKE.
But are we using it to the best of our ability?
I wasn’t.

So let’s test out this bad boy using the WideWorldImporters database, see if we can find everyone with the first name of Leyla.

Simple right? And because [Sales].[Customers] uses the full name, we have to use LIKE.

SELECT CustomerName
, CustomerID
FROM Sales.Customers
WHERE CustomerName LIKE 'Leyla%';
GO

Now a developer comes along and says “Wait a second, my sister is Leila”. So we try to cheat and add a wildcard in there.

SELECT CustomerName
, CustomerID
FROM Sales.Customers
WHERE CustomerName LIKE 'le%a%';
GO

Leonardo!? Well I suppose he does count in this situation, but there’s 2 characters between the ‘e’ and the ‘a’ and I only wanted one.

Well you can specify only 1 wildcard with the LIKE function by using the underscore (‘_’), so let’s try that.

SELECT CustomerName
, CustomerID
FROM Sales.Customers
WHERE CustomerName LIKE 'Le_la%';
GO

Yes, I cheated and inserted that extra name ‘Lejla’.

Call it Poetic Licence but I only used it to show that we still have options if this is not the results that we want. We are only interested in ‘Leyla’ and ‘Leila’.

‘Lejla’, while a lovely name I’m sure, is not what we require right this second. So what are we to do?

Well, did you know that LIKE has the range function as well? What’s range got to do with it? Well, what happens if we only put in a range of 2 characters?

SELECT CustomerName
, CustomerID
FROM Sales.Customers
WHERE CustomerName LIKE 'Le[iy]la%';
GO

There we go! Only the results that we want and none of that Lejla, Leonardo business.

Now you could argue with me (I encourage it actually. How else am I to learn?) and say that you would never do it this way. That it is much easier to do something along the lines of this:

SELECT CustomerName
, CustomerID
FROM Sales.Customers
WHERE CustomerName LIKE 'Leyla%'
OR CustomerName LIKE 'Leila%';
GO

I’ll admit that the above reads a lot easier, but it doesn’t scale very well though. What happens if we want to include the Leala, Lebla, Lecla,….all the way to Lenla’s? Are you going to write out 15 different clauses? 1 for each different character?

SELECT CustomerName
, CustomerID
FROM Sales.Customers
WHERE CustomerName LIKE 'Leyla%'
OR CustomerName LIKE 'Leila%'
OR ....
OR ...
OR ..
OR .
GO

Or are you going to go back to ranges and do a clean, efficient, single range?

SELECT CustomerName
, CustomerID
FROM Sales.Customers
WHERE CustomerName LIKE 'Le[a-ny]la%';
GO

Now I’d argue that that is a lot more readable than an endless list of OR clauses tacked on to the end of a script.

End: (‘%xyz’)

There is a lot more you can do with the LIKE function. Just because you may encounter this little guy every day does not mean that you know it.

Check out the documentation on MSDN. There’s information there like Pattern Matching with the ESCAPE Clause and different wildcard characters.

Don’t shy away from the fundamentals. Every little bit that you learn can and more than likely will be used to improve your skills and make you better.

Hopefully these little tidbits of knowledge will sink in…just like osmosis 🙂