How to use like condition with multiple values in

Question

I need to filter out records based on some text matching in nvarchar(1000) column. Table has more than 400 thousands records and growing. For now, I am using Like condition:-

SELECT 
    *
FROM
    table_01
WHERE
    Text like '%A1%'
    OR Text like '%B1%'
    OR Text like '%C1%'
    OR Text like '%D1%'

Is there any preferred work around?

Answer 1

You can try the following if you know the exact position of your sub string:

SELECT 
    *
FROM
    table_01
WHERE
    SUBSTRING(Text,1,2) in ('B1','C1','D1')

Answer 2

If you can create a FULLTEXT INDEX on that column of your table (that assumes a lot of research on performance and space), then you are probably going to see a big improvement on performance on text matching. You can go to this link to see what FULLTEXT SEARCH is and this link to see how to create a FULLTEXT INDEX.

Answer 3

I needed to do this so that I could allow two different databases in a filter for the DatabaseName column in an SQL Server Profiler Trace Template.

All you can do is fill in the body of a Like clause.

Using the reference in John Hartscock's answer, I found out that the like clause uses a sort of limited regex pattern.

For the OP's scenario, MSMS has the solution.

Assuming I want databases ABCOne, ABCTwo, and ABCThree, I come up with what is essentially independent whitelists for each character:

Like ABC[OTT][NWH][EOR]%

Which is easily extensible to any set of strings. It won't be ironclad, that last pattern would also match ABCOwe, ABCTnr, or ABCOneHippotamus, but if you're filtering a limited set of possible values there's a good chance you can make it work.

You could alternatively use the [^] operator to present a blacklist of unacceptable characters.

Answer 4

SELECT 
    *
FROM
    table_01
WHERE
    Text like '%[A-Z]1%'

This will check if the texts contains A1, B1, C1, D1, ...

Reference to using the Like Condition in SQL Server

Answer 5

Have a look at LIKE on msdn.

You could reduce the number filters by combining more details into a single LIKE clause.

SELECT 
    *
FROM
    table_01
WHERE
    Text like '%[ABCD]1%'