Sometimes we need to loosely match some filters in our Database. Think of a search. What if we wanted our website to contain a searchbar that let's users look for other users by 'name'? Well we can use WHERE name = user_search , but then the user needs to have the exact name for the results to work. SQL instead let's us loosely match things using "LIKE". "LIKE" gives us the wildcard operator % so that we can match the search string anywhere in the results. The beginning, the end, or the middle.