I know for sure that REXEXP works -- I'm using it currently. :) This is with mysql, and the docs say it aims for Posix like functionality, so while I don't expect it to handle some of the re's that pass PM's nodes, something simple like what I have above is doable (I can enter this from the direct db connection).

LIKE could work, but it requires 'extra' to handle the cases where I may have subset matches: eg, if I'm looking for ABC, and both ABC and ABCD exists, I'll get both. To solve the case where the items are in a ;-delimited list, I'd need 4 LIKE phases.. LIKE "ABC;%", LIKE ";ABC;", LIKE "%;ABC", and LIKE "ABC".