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 joins involved. In this case the query will scale linearly with your database size so you shouldn't worry too much about it slowing down over time.
David -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
