title: SQL Substring Subquery Taking Too Long
body: <p>My current subquery is taking :26 secs to run. I'm using the following query as a subquery as part of another code which altogether takes 2 mins and 25 secs for one month a data to return. </p>
  
  <p>Is there a faster query for this? The current procedureID contains alpha and numeric characters. I only want to pull the ProcedureID's beginning with numeric characters. </p>
  
  <pre><code>SELECT DISTINCT
  ProcedureID
  FROM Transactions
  WHERE Substring(ProcedureID,1,1) NOT LIKE '[A-z]%'
  </code></pre>