Where syntax

[fromalk]

Hello everyone,

I've ran into a small problem yesterday, and didn't find a solution yet so hopefully someone here can help me.
I've got a form where someone can search for a name, like John, William, Britney, Beyoncé etc, so those are all first names. Now I was wondering how I could make the query so that if one would enter the letter B for example he would get all the names with a B as a first letter?

Now in MSSQL this would be done with something like 'WHERE LIKE B*' but I can't really find a similar thing in the mysql reference.

When I did some googling on this an additional question popped up;
http://www.devguru.com/Technologies/sqlsyntax/quickref/sql_syntax_select.html#WHERE

as you can see there are 3 examples for the where, c1 = c2, c1 = c2, c& = c2
what are the functions of = or = in this case exactly?

Thanks in advance

[tomhath]

Never heard of B* in sql, standard syntax is:

where first_name like 'B%'

The =, = stuff is a non-standard way of doing joins, avoid it.

[bogu]

U should search the mysql manual, not the google:
http://dev.mysql.com
Here u can find reference about String Comparison Functions ...