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I've been pulling my hair out. I have a very simple postgre database, one specific table has a column named lName (uppercase N). Now I know with postgre I must quote lName since it contains an uppercase N.

I am trying to query the database with the following statement:

SELECT * 
FROM employee 
WHERE "lName" LIKE "Smith"
But I am receive this error: 
  
Warning: pg_query()
  [function.pg-query]: Query failed:
  ERROR: column "Smith" does not exist
  in .....
What is the issue here? Why is it saying the column is "Smith"?
Because "Smith" is an identifier, and in that position, an identifier is expected to be a column.  What you probably meant is a string literal, which uses single quotes: 'Smith'.  So
SELECT * FROM employee WHERE "lName" LIKE 'Smith'
You probably also want a wildcard in the string to search for ('Smith%'?).  LIKE matching is anchored to the beginning and end of a string, unlike typical regular expression matching.
        
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