The Informix MATCHES Operator

The Informix MATCHES operator is a non-ANSI extension to SQL that has little equivalent support in other RDBMs systems.

Due to this, it is often necessary to replace all instances of the MATCHES operator in your SQL statements.

It is not necessary to address the use of the 4GL MATCHES operator. For example, the following statement will present no problems with database conversion:

IF my_var MATCHES "[yY]" THEN .. END IF

However, the following statement will need to be addressed:

SELECT * FROM customer WHERE fname MATCHES "[pP]*"