The LIKE condition allows you to use wildcards in the where clause of a SQL statement in Access 2003/XP/2000/97. This allows you to perform pattern matching. The LIKE condition can be used in any valid SQL statement – select, insert, update, or delete.
The next thing we wanted the answer to was: what is a where clause in access SQL?
This is one of a set of articles about Access SQL. This article describes how to write a WHERE clause, and uses examples to illustrate various techniques that you can use in a WHERE clause. In a SQL statement, the WHERE clause specifies criteria that field values must meet for the records that contain the values to be included in the query results.
Another question we ran across in our research was “Is–not like–like BB*–allowed in MS Access?”.
What I found out is that MS Access will reject –Not Like “BB*”– if not enclosed in PARENTHESES, unlike –Like “BB*”– which is ok without parentheses. I tested these on MS Access 2010 and are all valid:.
What is a wildcard in MS Access?
Wildcards are special characters that can stand in for unknown characters in a text value and are handy for locating multiple items with similar, but not identical data.
For information about finding wildcard characters in an Access database, see the articles Use the Find and Replace dialog box to change data, Create a simple select query, and Update the data in a database. In this topic About supported character sets Find which ANSI standard a database supports ANSI-89 wildcard characters.
The next thing we asked ourselves was; what is the use of wildcards in access?
Wildcards can also help with getting databased on a specified pattern match. Access supports two sets of wildcard characters because it supports two standards for Structured Query Language. As a rule, you use the ANSI-89 wildcards when you run queries and find-and-replace operations against Access databases such as *.mdb and *.accdb files.
You use the ANSI-92 wildcards when you run queries against Access projects — Access files connected to Microsoft SQL Server databases. Access projects use the ANSI-92 standard because SQL Server uses that standard. The following table lists out characters supported by ANSI-89 −.
Can I use two different types of wildcards in the same database?
It’s recommended that you don’t mix the two types of wildcards in the same database. Use these wildcard characters in queries created for an Access database. Matches any number of characters. It can be used as the first or last character in the character string.? Matches any single alphabetic character.