FULLTEXT or LIKE 'word'..

Anon

I've got a database (with 5000 rows)..

First what I want to know is what do you recomend to use? Maybe FULLTEXT? Someone told me, that is much faster..

But, what if I created a table and then I want to use FULLTEXT, but didn't define fulltext when i was creating a table? how to define it now?

Can i use this command in blob or tinyblob columns?

But what if i use eg:
select * from TABLENAME where COLUMN LIKE '%someword%'

how to check for more words ('%word1%,%word2%' doesn't work..)?

Thank you for your answers,

LORDGreg

alanl

I'm assuming you are talking MySQL.

If so, I use TEXT columns, not especially for speed, just for the amount of text that can be stored.

You can use phpMyAdmin to change a column definition without losing data. You can also use the ALTER TABLE command, but I don't know the exact syntax.

Regarding your SELECT, you're right, you cannot do

SELECT * FROM table WHERE column LIKE ('%a%','%b%')

but you can do

SELECT * FROM table WHERE (column LIKE '%a%' OR column LIKE '%b%')

Note the brackets. It's best to put all the OR'ed tests against a column in brackets. Saves you a big headache if you later add "AND column2 = 'something'" to the SQL.

Hope this helps,
ALan

[deleted]

Manuals are great stuff, read them before posting.

http://www.mysql.com/doc/M/y/MySQL_full-text_search.html

runner

ALTER TABLE tbl_name CHANGE old_col_name new_col_name TEXT|BLOB|whatever ...

Guess it was like this. Check the manual still...