Paul,

> LIKE '%XY%' works in exactly the same way as STARTING WITH, i.e. it is
> optimised the same way if an index is there is will be used.

I think you meant LIKE 'XY%' here.

I would like to add that if you use

LIKE ?

then no indexes are used whatever the param value is.

> This optimisation feature was added around the 4.x time frame if I remember
> rightly. So if you have an older version of InterBase (3.3) you may not see
> this behaviour.

I thought IB5.
Ciao
--
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_/\/ando