Somebody wanted to understand why you can backquote a single wildcard operator (that’s the underscore _ character) in MySQL, but can’t in Oracle. The answer is you can in Oracle when you know that you required an additional clause.

While I prefer using regular expression resolution, the LIKE operator is convenient. Here’s an example of backquoting an underscore in MySQL, where it looks for any string with an underscore anywhere in the string:

SELECT   common_lookup_type
FROM     common_lookup
WHERE    common_lookup_type LIKE '%\_%';

You can gain the same behavior in Oracle by appending the ESCAPE '\' clause, like this:

SELECT   common_lookup_type
FROM     common_lookup
WHERE    common_lookup_type LIKE '%\_%' ESCAPE '\';

The ESCAPE '\' clause is one of those Oracle details that often gets lost. It only works when the SQL*Plus ESCAPE …

While working through prepared statements in MySQL, there was an interesting MySQL regular expression question raised. A student wanted to know how to address the following error message:

ERROR 1139 (42000): Got error 'repetition-operator operand invalid' FROM REGEXP

They had substituted * for a .+ in a metasequence. A metasequence is a parenthetical expression that evaluates based on multiple alternative conditions, and the pipe (|) acts as an OR operator. The full code example is found on page 482 of the Oracle Database 11g & MySQL 5.6 Developer Handbook. The student’s change would have worked without an …