Need a query that returns every field that contains a specified letter

Question

I have an SQL table with 11000 keywords in it   I want a query that can find fields which contain a certain letter   So  if I include  a  and  b  the query will select all fields which contain the letter  a  and the letter  b  somewhere in the field

User · Answer

There s most likely a more elegant way  but this does find every record with a letter in it  both upper or lower case   select   from your table where UPPER your field  like   A   or UPPER your field  like   B   or UPPER your field  like   C   or UPPER your field  like   D   or UPPER your field  like   E   or UPPER your field  like   F   or UPPER your field  like   G   or UPPER your field  like   H   or UPPER your field  like   I   or UPPER your field  like   J   or UPPER your field  like   K   or UPPER your field  like   L   or UPPER your field  like   M   or UPPER your field  like   N   or UPPER your field  like   O   or UPPER your field  like   P   or UPPER your field  like   Q   or UPPER your field  like   R   or UPPER your field  like   S   or UPPER your field  like   T   or UPPER your field  like   U   or UPPER your field  like   V   or UPPER your field  like   W   or UPPER your field  like   X   or UPPER your field  like   Y   or UPPER your field  like   Z

User · Answer

I ll assume you meant more or less what you said  and you want to find keywords in your table that  contain the letter  a  and the letter  b    Some of the solutions here give the answer to a different question   To get keywords that contain both the letters  a  and  b  in them  as opposed to those that contain either letter   you can use  ab  as the  in the query below   select   keyword from myTable where not exists     select Nums26 i from Nums26   where Nums26 i  lt   len  lt matchsetstring gt   -- or your dialect s equivalent for LEN     and keyword not like     substring  lt matchsetstring gt  Nums26 i 1      -- adapt SUBSTRING to your dialect      The table named  Nums26  should contain a column  i   indexed for efficiency  that contains each of the values 1 through 26  or more if you might try to match more than letters   See below  Advice given by others applies with regard to upper lower case  If your collation is case-sensitive  however  you can t simply specify  aAbB  here as your   because that would request keywords that contain each of the four characters a  A  b  and B  You might use UPPER and match  AB   perhaps   create table nums26     i int primary key    insert into nums26 values  1   insert into nums26 select 1 i from nums26  insert into nums26 select 2 i from nums26  insert into nums26 select 4 i from nums26  insert into nums26 select 8 i from nums26  insert into nums26 select 16 i from nums26

User · Answer

select   from your table where your field like   a b     and be prepared to wait a while     Edit  note that this pattern looks for an  a  followed by a  b   possibly with other  stuff  in between  -- rereading your question  that may not be what you wanted

User · Answer

All the answers given using LIKEare totally valid  but as all of them noted will be slow  So if you have a lot of queries and not too many changes in the list of keywords  it pays to build a structure that allows for faster querying   Here are some ideas   If all you are looking for is the letters a-z and you don t care about uppercase lowercase  you can add columns containsA    containsZ and prefill those columns   UPDATE table SET containsA    X   WHERE UPPER your field  Like   A       and so on for all the columns    Then index the contains   columns and your query would be  SELECT  FROM your table WHERE containsA    X  AND containsB    X    This may be normalized in an  index table  iTable with the columns your table key  letter  index the letter-column and your query becomes something like  SELECT FROM your table  WHERE  lt key gt  in  select a key     From iTable a join iTable b and a key   b key     Where a letter    a      AND b letter    b      All of these require some preprocessing  maybe in a trigger or so   but the queries should be a lot faster

User · Answer

where somefield like   a   or somefield like   b

User · Answer

select   from table where keyword like   a   and keyword like   b     ps This will be super slow   You may want to investigate full text indexing solutions

User · Answer

You can use a cursor and temp table approach so you aren t doing full table scan each time  What this would be doing is populating the temp table with all of your keywords  and then with each string in the  letters XML  it would remove any records from the temp table  At the end  you only have records in your temp table that have each of your desired strings in it   declare  letters xml  SET  letters     amp lt letters amp gt               amp lt letter amp gt a amp lt  letter amp gt               amp lt letter amp gt b amp lt  letter amp gt           amp lt  letters amp gt    -- SELECTING LETTERS FROM THE XML SELECT Letters l value       nvarchar 50    AS letter FROM  letters nodes   letters letter   AS Letters l   -- CREATE A TEMP TABLE WE CAN DELETE FROM IF A RECORD DOESN T HAVE THE LETTER CREATE TABLE  TempResults  keywordID int not null  keyWord nvarchar 50  not null  INSERT INTO  TempResults  keywordID  keyWord  SELECT employeeID  firstName FROM Employee  -- CREATE A CURSOR  SO WE CAN LOOP THROUGH OUR LETTERS AND REMOVE KEYWORDS THAT DON T MATCH DECLARE Cursor Letters CURSOR READ ONLY FOR      SELECT Letters l value       nvarchar 50    AS letter     FROM  letters nodes   letters letter   AS Letters l   DECLARE  letter varchar 50  OPEN Cursor Letters  FETCH NEXT FROM Cursor Letters INTO  letter WHILE    fetch status  lt  gt  -1  BEGIN     IF    fetch status  lt  gt  -2      BEGIN         DELETE FROM  TempResults          WHERE  keywordID NOT IN           SELECT keywordID FROM  TempResults WHERE keyWord LIKE        letter            END     FETCH NEXT FROM Cursor Letters INTO  letter END  CLOSE Cursor Letters DEALLOCATE Cursor Letters  SELECT   FROM  TempResults  DROP Table  TempResults GO

User · Answer

try this  Select   From Table Where field like       ltrValue1         And field like       ltrValue2           etc    and be prepared for a table scan as this functionality cannot use any existing indices

User · Answer

I d use wildcard searching   where  lt field gt  like    ab      It isn t regex  but it does a good job  You can also do variants like  lt field gt  like  sim oa ns  -- which will match simons  and simans      Depnding on your collation you may or may not have to include case data  like    aAbB     As mentioned elsewhere be prepared for a wait since indexes are out of the question when you re doing contains searching

[sql] Need a query that returns every field that contains a specified letter

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