table searching

how do you search multiple tables? i have 3 tables and i want to search for a certain name, and the name may be in either of the 3 tables, i also want to return similiar names as the one being looked for. That is, if someone looks for tom then it will look in all three tables returning the results for tom, tommy, tom1, tom2, etc.

thanks in advance...

You'll have to query each table seperately.

As far as searching for a column that would contain all variations:

select * from tbl_name where clmn_name LIKE '%$search_term%'

This will return records that contain the search term in clmn_name at any location. '$search_term%' will return if the search term STARTS the field.

HTH