Use LIKE where matching pattern is a column value plus a wildcard?

Personally I have always found LEFT(col, length) to be quicker than LIKE 'value%' - but others swear blind that the exact opposite is true. If you just want the value you're searching for to be at the start, it's worth trying, because the performance of both methods can be variable...

SELECT USR.USER_ID, USR.LDAP_TITLE, LRM.LDAP_ROLE, LRM.ROLE_ID, RLS.PRIMARY_ROLE
FROM USERS USR, NEW_LDAP_ROLE_MATCH LRM, NEWROLES RLS
WHERE (INSTR(USR.LDAP_TITLE,LRM.LDAP_ROLE) > 0) 
AND LRM.ROLE_ID = RLS.ROLE_ID; 

Late reply but i guess it might hel someone later.

I'd definitely be interested in the datatypes. Have you tried moving the location of DM.KeyIndicator = 'O' to the WHERE clause? Sometimes that positioning does make a difference.

Here is the situation..
=============
id key
=============
1 bo
2 fr
=============
..and i would like to query something like " where %column% = criteria.

Example: If i query for 'aboz', it would return row 1 (from above table) as result and if i query for 'fried', it would return row 2 (from above table) as result. It's the opposite with common situation. Is this the similar problem with yours? I've been looking for solution from weeks ago..

We have a similar problem here. The main difference is that we're using MS-Dynamics. This forces the character fields to be CHAR and not VARCHAR, or NVARCHAR (Dynamics does not support Unicode). Because of this we need to do LTRIM or RTRIM on the fields when we're using one like another.