LIKE with a leading wildcard reads the whole table. A small side table of words turns that scan into a quick lookup, and you do not need full-text installed.
Finding Apostrophes in SQL Server Text: Straight and Curly
Finding apostrophes in SQL Server text takes one trick and one trap. The trick is doubling the quote inside a LIKE pattern. The trap is that text can hold a curly apostrophe, and the usual search skips it. This post tests both on a table of eight shop names.
Special Characters in a LIKE Pattern: Which Ones Are Wildcards
Special characters in a LIKE pattern can match the wrong rows, because three symbols mean more than themselves. This post tests every common symbol on one small table. It shows how to search for a percent sign, an underscore and a bracket, and why a space in the pattern counts.
![Four LIKE wildcards with a real example each: percent matches Baker and Brooks for B percent, underscore finds Baker, Patel and Taylor for underscore a percent, [A-K] returns five names, and [^A-K] returns nine](https://blog.sqlauthority.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/wildcard-basics-in-sql-server-how-like-patterns-work-cover.webp)
Wildcard Basics in SQL Server: How LIKE Patterns Work
Wildcard basics for SQL Server: how LIKE works with %, _, sets and ranges, shown on one small table of last names. It also covers the mistakes with equal signs and sets, case and accents in ranges, and matching a wildcard literally. Every result comes from SQL Server 2025.
SQL SERVER – Collate – Case Sensitive SQL Query Search
Make a SQL Query Search case sensitive: add COLLATE Latin1_General_CS_AS to the WHERE clause so ‘casesearch’ matches one row instead of all four.