A trouble with "LIKE" in a select statement

Question

Hi!
I'm having trouble with "LIKE" in a select statement...
With Access I can make the following and everything works well:
SELECT name, birthday
FROM client
WHERE birthday LIKE '*/02/*';
but if try to do it in my application (it uses Access), it doesn't work - I just can't understand that!!!
In my application the "month" is always the currently month taken from the "System". Look what I'm doing...
String query1 = "SELECT name, birthday " +
          "FROM client " +
          "WHERE birthday " +
          "LIKE '*/" +
          pMonth +
          "/*' " +
          "ORDER BY birthday ASC ";
ResultSet rs = statement1.executeQuery(consulta1);
boolean moreRecords = rs.next();
The variable "moreRecords" is always "false", the query returns nothing although the table "client" has records that attend the query.
Please, anyone can help me?! It's a little bit urgent.
Thanks,
Katia.

Answer 1

Hi Katia,
I'll bet the problem lies with the characters you're using to escape the LIKE clause. You're using the ones that Access likes to see, but that's not necessarily what's built into the JDBC-ODBC driver class.
You can find out what the correct escape wildcard characters are from the java.sql.DatabaseMetaData.getSearchStringEscape() method. It'll tell you what to use in the LIKE clause.
I'm not 100% sure about your code. It doesn't use query1 anywhere. I'd do this:
String query = "SELECT name, birthday FROM client WHERE birthday LIKE ? ORDER BY birthday ASC";
PreparedStatement statement = connection.createStatement(query);
String escape = connection.getMetaData().getSearchStringEscape();
String test = escape + '/' + pMonth + '/' + escape;
statement.setString(1, test);
ResultSet rs = statement.executeQuery();
while (rs.hasNext())
// load your data into a data structure to pass back.
rs.close();
statement.close();Let me know if that works. - MOD