Oracle sql queries

Question

I am working on a small relational database for school and having trouble with a simple query. I am supposed to find all records in a table that have a field with the word 'OMG' somewhere in the text. I have tried a few other and I can't figure it out. I am getting an invalid relational operator error.

my attempts:

select * from comments where contains('omg');
select * from comments where text contains('omg');
select * from comments where about('omg');

and several more variations of the above. As you can see I am brand spanking new to SQL. text is the name of the field in the comments table.

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

Assuming that the column name is text:

select * from comments where text like '%omg%';

The percentage % is a wild-card which means that any text can come before/after omg

Pay attention, if you don't want the results to contain words in which omg` is a substring - you might want to consider adding whitespaces:

select * from comments where text like '% omg %';

Of course that it doesn't cover cases like:

• omg is at the end of the sentence (followed by a ".")
  
• omg has "!" right afterwards
  
• etc
  

Answer 2

You may want to use the LIKE operator with wildcards (%):

SELECT * FROM comments WHERE text LIKE '%omg%';