Use of regular expression

I'm wondering if using regular expressions is a good way to handle a word search. What I need is an exact match of a series of characters, say 'rick', in a character field. I have only used regular expressions a couple of times and the syntax still gets me confused. I think I see a way to do this with with something like r{1}i{1}c{1}k{1}.

I know I can do this with the %SCAN op code. The reason I'm thinking about using regular expressions is the search will be over a table of close to 1 billion records and I'm looking for efficiencies any place I can find them. If an expression can be created I want to do some comparisons between using a regular expression and %SCAN to see which is really the best performer.

Any thought would be appreciated.

Rick Chevalier
IT Software Solutions - Loan Servicing

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