On Monday 20 July 2009 04:46:53 Robert James wrote: > I'm storing a lot of words in a database. What's the fastest format for > finding them? I'm going to be doing a lot of WHERE w LIKE 'marsh%' and > WHERE w IN ('m', 'ma'). All characters are lowercase a-z, no punctuation, > no other alphabets. By default I'm using varchar in utf-8 encoding, but > was wondering if I could specificy something else (perhaps 7bit ascii, > perhaps lowercase only) that would speed things up even further. If your data is only lowercase a-z, as you say, then the binary representation will be the same in all server-side encodings, because they are all supersets of ASCII. These concerns will likely be dominated by the question of proper indexing and caching anyway. -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance