MATCHES and LIKE
Informix®
Informix supports MATCHES and
LIKE operators in SQL statements.
MATCHES expects * and ? wild-card characters,
while LIKE uses the % and _ wild-cards as
equivalents.
( col MATCHES 'Smi*' AND col NOT MATCHES 'R?x' )
( col LIKE 'Smi%' AND col NOT LIKE 'R_x' )MATCHES accepts also brackets notation, to specify a set of matching characters
at a given position:
( col MATCHES '[Pp]aris' )
( col MATCHES '[0-9][a-z]*' )ORACLE
Oracle® does not provide an equivalent
of the Informix
MATCHES operator.
The LIKE operator is supported.
With Oracle,
columns defined as CHAR(N) are blank padded, and trailing blanks are significant in
LIKE expressions. As a result, with a CHAR(5) value such as
'abc ' (with 2 trailing blanks), the expression (colname LIKE
'ab_') will not match. To workaround this behavior, you can use (RTRIM(colname)
LIKE 'pattern'). However, consider adding the condition AND
(colname LIKE 'patten%') to force the DB server to optimize the query of
the column as indexed. The CONSTRUCT instruction uses this technique when the
entered criteria does not end with a * star wildcard.
Solution
The database driver is able to translate Informix
MATCHES expressions to LIKE expressions, when no [
] bracket character ranges are used in the MATCHES operand.
MATCHES to LIKE expression translation is controlled by the
following FGLPROFILE
entry:dbi.database.dbname.ifxemul.matches = { true | false }Only [NOT] MATCHES followed by a search pattern provided as
a string literal can be converted by ODI drivers. A [NOT] MATCHES followed by a ?
question mark parameter place holder is not translated!
For maximum portability, consider replacing the MATCHES expressions with
LIKE expressions in all SQL statements.
Avoid using CHAR(N) types for variable length character data (such as name,
address).