Question

I need something in between a full text search and an index search:
I want to search for text in one column of my table (probably there will be an index on the column, too, if that matters).

Problem is, I want to search for words in the column, but I don’t want to match parts.

For example, my column might contain business names:
Mighty Muck Miller and Partners Inc.
Boy & Butter Breakfast company

Now if I search for ‘Miller‘ I want to find the first line. But if I search for ‘iller‘ I don’t want to find it, because there is no word starting with ‘iller’. Searching for ‘Break‘ should find ‘Boy & Butter Breakfast company‘, though, since one word is starting with ‘Break‘.

So if I try and use

WHERE BusinessName LIKE %Break% 

it will find too many hits.

Is there any way to Search for Words separated by whitespace or other delimiters?

(LINQ would be best, plain SQL would do, too)

Important: Spaces are by far not the only delimiters! Slashes, colons, dots, all non-alphanumerical characters should be considered for this to work!

Answer 1

SQL Server 2000 or above.

SELECT *   FROM dbo.TblBusinessNames  WHERE BusinessName like '%[^A-z^0-9]Break%' -- In the middle of a sentence     OR BusinessName like 'Break%'            -- At the beginning of a sentence 

Keyword Reference for LIKE: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa933232(SQL.80).aspx