Question

I wish to find all rows in a table where one column is a substring of another column.

In other words, suppose I have a table (called people) with two columns: firstname and lastname, and I want to find all people like ‘rob robinowitz’ and ‘jill bajillion’.

Is there a way to do something like ‘select * from people where lastname like %firstname%’? (But something which actually works).

Answer 1

You were close

select * from people where lastname like '%' + firstname + '%' 

Alternative way (may be even faster)

select * from people where charindex(firstname,lastname)>0