LIKE matches text against a simple pattern with two wildcards; regular expressions are available as dialect extensions.

Wildcard	Matches	Example	Matches…
`%`	Any sequence of 0+ characters	`'A%'`	Asha, Arjun
`_`	Exactly one character	`'_a%'`	Ravi, Karan, Sara (second letter a)

SQL

SELECT name FROM employees WHERE name LIKE 'A%'   ORDER BY name;
SELECT name FROM employees WHERE name LIKE '_a%'  ORDER BY name;
SELECT name FROM employees WHERE name LIKE '%an%' ORDER BY name;

Output

name
-----
Arjun
Asha

name
-----
Karan
Ravi
Sara

name
-----
Karan

Case sensitivity

SQLite's LIKE is case-insensitive for ASCII letters; PostgreSQL's LIKE is case-sensitive (use ILIKE); MySQL/SQL Server follow the column collation (usually insensitive). Portable trick: compare lowercased values.

SQL

SELECT name FROM employees WHERE name LIKE 'a%' ORDER BY name;              -- SQLite: matches A
SELECT name FROM employees WHERE name GLOB 'a*' ORDER BY name;              -- GLOB: case-sensitive
SELECT name FROM employees WHERE lower(name) LIKE 'a%' ORDER BY name;       -- portable

Output

name
-----
Arjun
Asha

name
----

name
-----
Arjun
Asha

Matching a literal % or _

SQL

CREATE TABLE promos (code TEXT);
INSERT INTO promos VALUES ('SAVE10%'), ('SAVE10'), ('FLAT_50'), ('FLATX50');

SELECT code FROM promos WHERE code LIKE '%\%' ESCAPE '\' ORDER BY code;
SELECT code FROM promos WHERE code LIKE 'FLAT\_%' ESCAPE '\' ORDER BY code;
SELECT code FROM promos WHERE code LIKE 'FLAT_%' ORDER BY code;          -- _ is a wildcard!

Output

code
-------
SAVE10%

code
-------
FLAT_50

code
-------
FLATX50
FLAT_50

Regular expressions (dialects)

PostgreSQL / MySQL / Oracle

SELECT name FROM employees WHERE name ~ '^[AEIOU]';          -- PostgreSQL (~* = case-insensitive)
SELECT name FROM employees WHERE name REGEXP '^[AEIOU]';     -- MySQL
SELECT name FROM employees WHERE REGEXP_LIKE(name, '^[AEIOU]');  -- Oracle / MySQL 8

Find names that start and end with a vowel.