Seeing if a word starts with a certain letter

[Anon]

If I have a column with several phrases in it and I want to select all of the phrases that start with the letter "A", how would I go about doing this?

[Anon]

please specify!

[Anon]

OK, sorry if I wasn't more specific earlier.

Let's say in one column in my database I have these words all in different rows: "Apple" "Alien" "Baby" "Cat" "Dog"

Now I want to display the rows, but I ONLY want to display the ones that start with the letter "A". Therefore I only want to show "Apple" and "Alien". How would I do this?

[Anon]

Using MySQL:
SELECT * from tablename WHERE fieldname like 'a%' will return only rows where the specified field contains an a at thye begininng