What great timing for this article!

I'm just finishing up the design for an application that involves a "call module". This module is a place for users to record various data about phone calls that come into our agency. One of the features in the application is that the users need to be able to look up (search) records by the caller's phone number.

For various reasons, when entering the phone number data, users will have to enter the full phone number, including an area code. Ex: (541)444-5555.

However, the VAST majority of phone numbers that our users will enter or see will have the same area code. So, I've been playing with the idea of adding a feature where staff only have to enter the last 7 digits when doing a search.

I've been reluctant to implement such a feature for a couple reasons, one of which is precisely because I didn't want to have a WHERE clause such as:

WHERE phone like '%444-5555'

Yuck.

This article has given me a technique that makes that feature more palatable. I understand Jeff's caution. Even so, I'm excited about this idea because I think it might be perfect for the situation in my application. Thanks.

(The reason I explained my situation in detail is because I thought it might be helpful to provide a real-world example of when this need might come into play. If I didn't have such a need myself right now, I would not have been able to think of a realistic example of why anyone would really want to provide a "search the end" feature for users.)