Re: [PHP] Mysql strategy

On Tue, 2006-11-14 at 00:51 +1100, David Tulloh wrote:
Dotan Cohen wrote:
If I have to perform 30 LIKE searches for different keywords in a
varchar field, which strategy would be recommended:
1) 30 searches, one for each keyword
2) To select the varchar field from all the rows, and search through
them with php's array functions?

It's not going to make a great deal of difference if you do the
processing in the MySQL or the PHP, in this case it's basically the same
operation in each. I suspect that efficiently recreating the LIKE
functionality in PHP wouldn't be trivial to do, if you are just doing
straight comparisons the MySQL STRCMP function should be faster.

If you are worried about the speed of this query I'd suggest rethinking
your database structure. Text field comparisons will always be
relatively slow compared to numeric comparisons or numeric lookups. My
reading of this query however is that it should be 30 OR comparisons, no

Except that most search engines refine the search when you add more
keywords in contrast to your suggestion of expanding the search :)

Cheers,
Rob.
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