optimized searching - need desperate help

[Ankur Saxena]

Hi I have a table with phonenums upto 1 million and I have to search through these to find the name and time is of essense. I have currently stored these as VARCHAR and I get response time as 0.64-0.84 secs with 500,000 phones in the table.

Should I store them as BIGINT or some other datatype and if so how does mysql differentiate between the searches. Isnt there an optimized searching that we can do? like binary search on something like this would be killer fast, I would like response times in .05-.1 sec range.

Hope someone can clear how mysql optimizes searches and how I can store these value to optimize it from my side.

Plus I wanted to add that this searching would be happening very often. Imagine being in a telephone switch and recieving calls every so often.

Also is there a way of telling mysql to keep the data sorted by some field all the time?

Thanks.
Ankur



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/02/2005 09:17AM by Ankur Saxena.