Question

I would like to have a short form of the SQL-command (I am using Oracle SQL)

SELECT * from table1 
WHERE field1 not like '%test%' 
AND field2 not like '%test%' 
AND field3 not like '%test%'

Is there a syntax which is equivalent to that command? I was thinking about something like

SELECT * from table1 
WHERE '%test%' not in (field1, field2, field3)

but this syntax unfortunately doesn’t work?! Many thanks for all tips and suggestions.

Answer 1

No, it’s not really possible.

This transformation using one of De Morgan’s laws is very slightly shorter but there’s only a few characters difference:

SELECT *
FROM table1 
WHERE NOT (field1 LIKE '%test%' OR
           field2 LIKE '%test%' OR 
           field3 LIKE '%test%')

There is also this hack that is shorter still, but I would advise against it because it will give you a reduction in performance of your query as well as introducing the possiblity of a bug if you change the string literal '%test%' to something that could contain an underscore, for example '%te_st%':

SELECT *
FROM table1 
WHERE (field1 + '_' + field2 + '_' + field3) NOT LIKE '%test%'

I think what you are already doing is the best solution.