Using Wildcard Characters in the CONTAINS Predicate
The CONTAINS predicate supports the use of the asterisk (*) as a wildcard character to represent words and phrases. You can add the asterisk only at the end of the word or phrase. The presence of the asterisk enables the prefix-matching mode. In this mode, matches are returned if the column contains the specified search word followed by zero or more other characters.
If a phrase is provided, each word contained in the phrase is considered to be a separate prefix. Therefore, a query specifying a prefix term of "local wine*" matches any rows with the text of "local winery", "locally wined and dined", and so on.
Examples
Word matching
This example matches documents that have any word in the FileName column beginning with "serv".
...WHERE CONTAINS(System.FileName, '"serv*"')
Example matching words include "server", "servers", and "service".
Phrase matching
This example matches documents with any phrase in the FileName column that begins with "comp" and in which the next word begins with "serv".
...WHERE CONTAINS(System.FileName, '"comp serv*"')
Example matching phrases include "comp server", "computer servers", and "competitor's service".
Suffix matching (not supported)
The asterisk works only for prefix-matching and can be placed only at the end of the word or phrase; it does not work for suffix-matching. The following syntax is not valid and does not match documents with any word in the FileName column ending with "serve".
-- DO NOT USE.
WHERE CONTAINS(System.FileName, '"*serve"')
Related topics
Reference