Efficient string comparison to a group of values

[Matt Clifton]

Hi

(Post edited to change "WHERE field = options" to "WHERE field IN options").

I have a website using PHP and MySQL 5.0; the database holds personal names, addresses and various information. Right now I'm building a query which checks whether a person lives in a certain group of UK counties.

I've got arrays set up in PHP which hold the groups of counties, and I've dynamically created a "group" from each array. So, in PHP,

$county_array = array('Kent','Surrey','London','Essex','...');
$county_group gets set to "('kent','surrey','london','essex',...)"

Each group may hold perhaps 20 individual counties.

Now, for my database query, I use:

$query = "SELECT ... WHERE lower(county) IN $county_group";

Is the "WHERE field IN (a|b|c|d|e|...)" a slow comparison in MySQL? Is there a more efficient way to do it? Is this something that stored procedures can help me with?

Thanks!

Matt



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/31/2009 10:07AM by Matt Clifton.