在没有CLR或全文的情况下，是否有更好的方法在SQL Server 2008中搜索任意文本？

Question

Using SQL Server 2008, without using full-text indexing or CLR integration, is there a better way to search a table column for arbitrary text than the following:

declare @SubString nvarchar(max) = 'Desired substring may contain any special character such as %^_[]'

select * from Items where Name like '%' +

    replace(
    replace(
    replace(
    replace(
    replace(
    replace(
        @SubString
    ,';',';;')
    ,'%',';%')
    ,'[',';[')
    ,']',';]')
    ,'^',';^')
    ,'_',';_')

    + '%' escape ';'

That works, but it seems unnecessarily barbaric. Is there any simpler, clearer, or more efficient way, given the above limitations?

There are no constraints on what the Name column might contain, nor what the SubString we're searching for might contain.

Answer 1

The only thing I can think of is to turn your replace(replace(replace... into a user-defined function. Then you could streamline your query into:

SELECT * FROM Items WHERE Name LIKE CleanMyString(@Substring) escape ';'

It's not exactly "simpler". It's not likely to be any more efficient. But it does clean up the syntax and make it cleaner-looking.

Answer 2

(You can use charindex for straight string searches such as finding every firstname that contains Ben with:

 select * for customers where charindex('Ben', firstname) > 0

or you can create all kinds of powerful pattern searching with patindex:

SELECT PATINDEX ('%[0-9].%[0-9].%[0-9].%','278.2.6.49'); 

which returns the number before the first dot or 0 if there aren't three sets of numbers in the string.

For a very good introduction of using patterns (its not regular expressions) in TSQL (from where the above example was copied) please see: https://www.simple-talk.com/sql/t-sql-programming/patindex-workbench/