Searching for an exact value in a database is easy — you just use = . But what do you do when you only know part of the value? Maybe you want to find all customers whose email ends in @gmail.com , or all products with "pro" somewhere in the name. That's where SQL's LIKE operator comes in. In this guide you'll learn how LIKE works, how to use both wildcard characters, and the gotchas that trip people up. By the end you'll be writing confident pattern-matching queries. The LIKE Operator LIKE is used in a WHERE clause to match a column value against a pattern string. If the value matches the pattern, the row is included in the results. SELECT * FROM customers WHERE email LIKE '%@gmail.com' ; The % is a wildcard — we'll cover exactly what it means in a moment. Let's use a concrete table for all examples.…