Re: Difference between 'LIKE' and '='

[Ian Sales (DBA)]

Joshua Beall wrote:
Hi All,
From what I understand the LIKE keyword allows you to do things like include 
wildcards and match against regular expressions.
But I have a question: is there any difference between the following?
SELECT lname, fname FROM contacts WHERE lname = 'smith';
SELECT lname, fname FROM contacts WHERE lname LIKE 'smith';
I'm having difficulty figuring out the difference between these two queries, 
if there is any.  Can someone clarify?

 

- er, there is no difference as you've written it. But if you use 
wildcards, you get a very different set of results:

SELECT lname, fname FROM contacts WHERE lname = 'smith';
... will bring back all rows where lname is exactly 'smith'
SELECT lname, fname FROM contacts WHERE lname LIKE '%smith%';
... will bring back all rows where lname contains the letters 's m i t 
h', in that order, such as Smithfield, Aerosmith, Nasmith, Smithsonian...

- ian
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