What is LIKE operator and when is it used?

Parthiban Kannan

Updated on January 8, 2026

< 1 min read

The LIKE operator is used to search for patterns in text columns.
It allows partial matches using wildcards like % and _.
In my project, we used LIKE to find customers with email addresses from a specific domain.
% represents any sequence of characters, _ represents a single character.
It is helpful for flexible string matching and data cleaning.
LIKE is commonly used in reports, searches, and validation queries.
It enables pattern-based filtering without exact matches.