Computed columns

How to Make Leading Wildcard Searches Fast

Last Updated July 27, 2025

99.9% of you are never gonna need this. But let’s say you need to run queries with leading (not trailing) wildcards, like this search for all the different national versions of the Encabulator, each of which has different prefixes depending on which government it’s being sold to: Transact-SQL SELECT * FROM dbo.Parts WHERE PartNumber LIKE…

Making TRY_CAST and TRY_CONVERT Queries Faster with Indexed Computed Columns

Last Updated March 1, 2020

Brent Ozar

Computed columns, Execution Plans, T-SQL

I know this is gonna sound crazy, but let’s say you had a table where people stored all kinds of things in one column: dates, integers, file names, sale prices, file names, you name it. And let’s say your application frequently ran a query looking for dates in that column, like this: Transact-SQL SELECT *…

Computed Columns: Reversing Data For Easier Searching

Last Updated January 19, 2018

Erik Darling

Computed columns, Development, SQL Server

During Training We were talking about computed columns, and one of our students mentioned that he uses computed columns that run the REVERSE() function on a column for easier back-searching. What’s back-searching? It’s a word I just made up. The easiest example to think about and demo is Social Security Numbers. One security requirement is…