I needed to update a set of records in the database where a “code” column followed a specific format:
prefix_shortname_number
As it turned out, there were a bunch of entries that I did *not* want to update that followed a similar format:
prefix_shortname_letter
This would have been bad:
UPDATE TABLE_NAME SET column_name = 'value' WHERE code LIKE 'prefix_shortname[_]%'
As luck would have it, SQL Server (I didn’t check this on MySQL) allows a little bit of semi-regex in LIKE statements. This update statement worked perfectly:
UPDATE TABLE_NAME SET column_name = 'value' WHERE code LIKE 'prefix_shortname_[0-9]%'
SQL Server will match a single character within the range provided between the brackets; which was all I needed 
