Comparison Search Conditions

Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 uses these comparison operators.

Operator	Meaning
=	Equal to
>	Greater than
<	Less than
>=	Greater than or equal to
<=	Less than or equal to
< >	Not equal to (SQL-92 compatible)
!>	Not greater than
!<	Not less than
!=	Not equal to

Comparison operators are specified between two expressions. For example, to retrieve the names of only those products for which the unit price is greater than $50, use:

SELECT ProductName
FROM Northwind.dbo.Products
WHERE UnitPrice > $50.00

When you compare character string data, the logical sequence of the characters is defined by the collation of the character data. The result of comparison operators such as < and > are controlled by the character sequence defined by the collation. The same SQL Collation might have different sorting behavior for Unicode and non-Unicode data. (For more information, see SQL Server Collation Fundamentals.)

Trailing blanks are ignored in comparisons in non-Unicode data; for example, these are equivalent:

WHERE au_lname = 'White'
WHERE au_lname = 'White '
WHERE au_lname = 'White' + SPACE(1)

The use of NOT negates an expression. For example, this query finds all products that have a unit price of $50 or more, which is logically the same as asking for all products that do not have a unit price of less than $50:

SELECT ProductID, ProductName, UnitPrice
FROM Northwind.dbo.Products
WHERE NOT UnitPrice < $50
ORDER BY ProductID

See Also

String Concatenation Operator

+ (String Concatentation)

Data Types

Operators

SQL Server Collation Fundamentals