Access 2010 SQL Query find partial match in string of full word only

Question

I hope this is a simple one, I just can't find how to get the result I want, maybe I am using the wrong keyword in SQL?

I am searching an Employee table which contains a Full Name field, this field can be "Sam" or "Mr Evans" or "Mr Sam Evans"

I am trying to find partial matches with another Names table which contains a Name field - this is usually a short name such as "Sam" or "Evans" but could be "Sam Evans"

I have tried like, with and without * as follows

SELECT tblEmployee.FullName, tblNames.Name
FROM tblEmployee, tblNames
WHERE tblEmployee.FullName Like "*" & tblNames.Name & "*"

as well as the results I do want, this query can return Employee FullName of "Mr. Samson" which I don't want. I only want to see results contaning the full word "Sam" not FullNames with Sam in part of a word within the string. So I want to see Mr. Sam Evans and Mr. Sam Smith and Ms. Sally Evans, etc.

I hope this makes sense. Many thanks for your help

Edit - solution

I have solved this - just posting in case it might help anyone with a similar problem.

WHERE " " & tblEmployee.FullName & " " Like "* " & tblNames.Name & " *"

so basically by adding a space at the beginning and the end of the Employee Full Name, I catch all the correct records. I hadn't realised you could pad out a field like this but a colleague tipped me off!

Answer 1

Wildcards in SQL and access are a % symbol;

so

"SELECT tblEmployee.FullName, tblNames.Name FROM tblEmployee, tblNames
WHERE tblEmployee.FullName Like '%" & tblNames.Name & "%'"

Will match any instance of the string tblNames.Name

You can use the % at the start or end only to get the match of just the start of the string / end of the string repectively.

edit

Apologies, you can use * and ? in access as you expect, however are you sending the query as a string to some VBA code? Or trying to run it directly? As directly in a query it'll not be able to parse the tblNames.Name string into the query and you'll need to pass that in from a form or other peice of code.

Edit based on comment

To select a specific word it's just a bit of a work around required:

SELECT * FROM table WHERE field LIKE '* myWord *' OR field LIKE '* myWord.*'

You can optionally caputure start of sentances `LIKE 'MyWord *' and word with commas, fullstops, exclamtion marks etc...

You could do an IN statement and have all the variations in a lookup table to keep it easy to maintain as another option.

Answer 2

I used this solution from the edited post in Access 2007 and it worked perfectly!

WHERE " " & tblEmployee.FullName & " " Like "* " & tblNames.Name & " *"

Now my question is, what the heck is the SQL code doing and why does it work? Can someone break it down?

EDITED:

OK, my confusion arose from the different use of characters in Access SQL vs more standard SQL. & is concatenate in Access, while + is concatnate in standard SQL. And * is the wildcard for any number of characters in Access while it is % in SQL.