34. Video: LIKE

LIKE Operator

The LIKE operator is extremely useful for working with text. You will use LIKE within a WHERE clause. The LIKE operator is frequently used with %. The % tells us that we might want any number of characters leading up to a particular set of characters or following a certain set of characters, as we saw with the google syntax above. Remember you will need to use single quotes for the text you pass to the LIKE operator, because of this lower and uppercase letters are not the same within the string. Searching for 'T' is not the same as searching for 't'. In other SQL environments (outside the classroom), you can use either single or double quotes.

Hopefully you are starting to get more comfortable with SQL, as we are starting to move toward operations that have more applications, but this also means we can't show you every use case. Hopefully, you can start to think about how you might use these types of applications to identify phone numbers from a certain region, or an individual where you can't quite remember the full name.