Question

I have a table, contacts, that has a dozen columns or so. I want to identify each row in which at least one column contains a regular expression. I’m wondering if it’s possible to do something like this:

select * from contacts where * like '%re%'; 

instead of this:

select * from contacts where last_name like '%re%' or first_name like '%re%' or ... ; 

Is this possible?

Answer 1

I don’t think that’s possible. Perhaps you could put a trigger on the table to update a single denormalized column?