Re: searching for a substring

[Gary Byatt]

Thanks for looking at this problem Boris.

Unfortunately the search will be initiated by a user looking for whatever they like, so I don’t know what they might try and therefore a pre-emptive search is not possible.

I did think that a rapid substring search is not going to be possible, because as you imply an index uses the start of the text, but hey, you don’t know what you don’t know, so I thought it was worth asking.

I looked at the use of ‘Full-Text’ search.
Unfortunately, that is only available for MyISAM tables and although it has many clever search features, substring search does not seem to be one of them.

I am disappointed that a substring search that avoids a full table scan seems impossible, as I suspect that given the chance, people would often want to search text for a phrase that they remember that may be embedded. I don’t know how unusual I am in my Google usage but I quite often use a phrase to improve the appropriateness of the search results. In fact I would say that would be my most common usage pattern.

Anyway, thanks again for the reply.
gary