Equals(=) vs. LIKE

Question

When using SQL, are there any benefits of using = in a WHERE clause instead of LIKE?

Without any special operators, LIKE

Answer 1

This is a copy/paste of another answer of mine for question SQL 'like' vs '=' performance:

A personal example using mysql 5.5: I had an inner join between 2 tables, one of 3 million rows and one of 10 thousand rows.

When using a like on an index as below(no wildcards), it took about 30 seconds:

where login like '12345678'

using 'explain' I get:

When using an '=' on the same query, it took about 0.1 seconds:

where login ='12345678'

Using 'explain' I get:

As you can see, the like completely cancelled the index seek, so query took 300 times more time.