Are there any tricks to searching databases?

Question

Instead of say a comma to simply separate words, can you input any other symbols, punctuation, brackets, etc. That help the database search better?

Answer 1

Using an asterisk * also known as a wildcard is helpful. This will allow you to type part of a word.

Example: If your searching for shoes and you type shoe* it will search anything with those letters.

Answer 2

use parentheses in the main words. the computer will search words in parentheses first. if not the computer will search the whole phrase.
try using conectors in a search like AND and OR ex: (dogs or ca
ts) (bones or fish)
when doing a search use the databases help menu

Answer 3

well you can search better by using wild card characters

select * from table will retrive all the records

if you are looking for pattern matching and want to cover all possibilities

select * from table where field_nm like 'Jo%' --> returns all the records with field_nm starting with Jo


select * from table where field_nm like '%Jo' --> returns all the records with field_nm ending with Jo

select * from table where field_nm like '%Jo%' --> returns all the records with field_nm containing Jo in the middle

when you are using multiple search conditions then to enable readability of the query enclose them the conditions in brackets

select * from table where ( name like 'Mervin%' and age >23) or (name like 'Chris%' and age >24)


if you looking for just a single character match ie your field_nm should return values like mervi,merve,merva

only one character changes then select * from table where field_nm like 'merv_'


finally just to improve the readablity of the output you can use aliases

select field_nm name,age_tab age from table

where age and name will be the headers in the fields returned



hope this helps