I cannot comment on Helen's and Martijns e-mails, I've never tried to
get into this kind of trouble. Though I may comment on one thing.

> If I use LIKE then it works fine but the trade off will be i don't
> have to use indexing then which will be big loss i suppose.

If the statement

A = B

returns too many rows, whereas

A LIKE B

returns the rows you want, but without using any index, then why don't
you simply do

(A = B) AND (A LIKE B)

to get the answer you want while using an index?

Set