Q:

How to retrieve rows that begin and end with specific characters? 

I have one table called STUDENT.  In this table there are two columns, ID and NAME.  I want to retrieve all rows from this table where name starts with 'ab' and ends with 'k'.  What is the SQL query for doing this? 

A:

I think you are looking for something like:
SELECT ID, NAME FROM STUDENT WHERE NAME LIKE 'ab%k';

For wildcard operations you should use a WHERE clause with the LIKE keyword that allows you to filter columns that match a given pattern using the %symbol as a wildcard. 
There is a question about the List of special characters for SQL LIKE clause that has a good list of LIKE special characters 

A:

select ID, Name from student where name like 'ab%%k'

A:

its like if you are looking for find name start with H and end with F just write query.  
select emp_name from employee_test where emp_name like 'H%F';

