SQL Server using wildcard within IN

Question

Since I believe this should be a basic question I know this question has probably been asked, but I am unable to find it. I\'m probably about to earn my Peer Pressure badge,

Answer 1

The IN operator is nothing but a fancy OR of '=' comparisons. In fact it is so 'nothing but' that in SQL 2000 there was a stack overflow bug due to expansion of the IN into ORs when the list contained about 10k entries (yes, there are people writing 10k IN entries...). So you can't use any wildcard matching in it.