MySQL's fulltext isn't too useful (to me anyway) before version 4 as you can't change the minimum word length to something bigger than 4 without a recompile. It also doesn't like '-' which means for this client you couldn't search for part numbers.

I didn't go for one of the modules on CPAN as I wanted something simple, the text search is in addition to 4 combo boxes (finish, material, mfg, and size in this case) and most users either leave it blank or just enter 1 or 2 words. I've got keys on the important fields and searching through 5,000 records takes < 0.2 seconds for a complicated query with 5 LIKEs and 2 REGEXPs.

I don't think this will scale fantastically for larger data sets where using some kind of fulltext index will really pay off.

Just for kicks I ran a quick test on a table with 550,000 rows, a simple LIKE/REGEXP takes 3.5 seconds while a REGEXP takes 12.

gav^

In reply to Re: Re: Searching with MySQL (and REGEXPs) by gav^
in thread Searching with MySQL (and REGEXPs) by gav^

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