Question

I have DB with the following values

! # ! FROM ! TO   !
!===!======!=======
! 1 ! aaaa ! aabb !
! 2 ! aa10 ! aa2a !
! 3 ! bb   ! cc   !
! 4 ! bb 20! bb 30!
! 5 ! bccc ! bccd !

FROM and TO can span any range. All suported charachters are allowed. FROM and TO can have different length. The DB has ~800’000 rows. The rows have mor columns which are important for the use case.

For an autocomplete field I have to find all records which do match somewhere between (including) FROM and TO.

I tried something like this:

SELECT *
FROM table WHERE (
  '11' BETWEEN from AND to
)

Unfortunately this does not match for FROM=1105 and TO=1110 .

How would the correct query for this look like?

Answer 1

Edit: The question was changed a bit, so replacing the answer since I’m at 0 anyway 🙂

What you want is something similar to; (‘b’ being the string searched for, note it’s mentioned twice in the question)

SELECT * FROM table1 WHERE 'b'
  BETWEEN SUBSTR(`FROM`, 1, CHAR_LENGTH('b')) 
      AND `TO`;

Of course if you know the string you’re searching for and the length of it, you can replace the CHAR_LENGTH() in actual code.

Demo here