MySQL Cookbook

Using FULLTEXT Searches

Problem

You want to search through a lot of text.

Solution

Use a FULLTEXT index.

Discussion

You can use pattern matches to look through any number of rows, but as the amount of text goes up, the match operation can become quite slow. It’s also common to look for the same text in several string columns, which with pattern matching tends to result in unwieldy queries:

SELECT * from tbl_name
WHERE col1 LIKE 'pat' OR col2 LIKE 'pat' OR col3 LIKE 'pat' ...

A useful alternative (available as of MySQL 3.23.23) is to use FULLTEXT searching, which is designed for looking through large amounts of text, and can search multiple columns simultaneously. To use this capability, add a FULLTEXT index to your table, then use the MATCH operator to look for strings in the indexed column or columns. FULLTEXT indexing can be used with MyISAM tables, for columns of type CHAR, VARCHAR, or TEXT.

FULLTEXT searching is best illustrated with a reasonably good-sized body of text. If you don’t have a sample dataset, several repositories of freely available electronic text are available on the Internet. For the examples here, the one I’ve chosen is the complete text of the King James Version of the Bible (KJV), which is relatively large and has the advantage of being nicely structured by book, chapter, and verse. Because of its size, this dataset is not included with the recipes distribution, but is available separately as the mcb-kjv distribution at the MySQL Cookbook web site.^[25] (See