Re: Mysql strategy

On 13/11/06, Chris <dmagick@gmail.com> 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 No. Horribly inefficient. 2) To select the varchar field from all the rows, and search through them with php's array functions? No. Make the database do the work. Use full text indexing: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/fulltext-search.html

Thanks, Chris, but that approach won't work as I don't know all the values that I'll be searching for at any one time. In fact, I only know one of them at a time. This is the makeLink function in another thread that you helped me in. However, I do see other use of the full-text search functions in my future! This looks like it could save me quite a bit of work on another project. Dotan Cohen