I'm a rank newbie to Postgres & am having a hard time getting my arms around this. I'm trying to construct a query to be run in a PHP script. I have an HTML form were someone can enter either a last name or a social security number & then query the database based on what they entered. My query looks like this: SELECT foo, baz, bar FROM public.table WHERE lastname ~* '$lastname' OR ssn='$ssn'" I need to leave the last name a wildcard in case someone enters a partial name, lower case / upper case, etc. I want the SSN to match exactly if they search by that. The way it's written, if I enter nothing for the last name, it returns all rows, regardless of what I enter for the ssn. I understand why it happens, but what can I do to return the desired results? Thank you. Mike
