Re: Text Searches on MySQL

At 05:05 PM 3/14/2001 +0000, you wrote:

I'm putting together a db with articles in it. Would it be better to have two tables with the main text of the articles in it linked to a main article table or just chuck it all in together in one table. I want to be able to do a full text search on the articles.

You cannot index "TEXT" fields in MySQL so doing a full text search is slow if you have any amount of data in your database (it needs to search every record for every search). The way I normally handle this is to create a second table of "words" which includes every word in a given article (that isn't in a stop word list) along with the original article ID so that I can index the strings. This makes a search very quick but adds the expense of disk space and slows the adding of data initially. You will have to decide whether in your case it matters. If you have little data then no big whoop. If you have lots of data then you need to look at different method of searching. Cheers, Ron -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

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