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]*' )
Netezza®
Netezza does not provide an equivalent of the Informix MATCHES
operator.
The LIKE
operator is supported.
The Netezza ~
operator
expects regular expressions as follows: ( col ~ 'a.*'
)
With Netezza , columns defined as
CHAR(N)
are blank padded, and trailing blanks are significant in the
LIKE
expressions. As 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 do (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 is 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).