MySQL search within the last 5 characters in a column?
mysql, search, substring
Solution
The reason that
WHERE name LIKE '%ith'
is a slow way to look for 'John Smith' by last name is the same reason that
WHERE Right(name, InStr(name, ' ' )) LIKE 'smi%'
or any other expression on the column is slow. It defeats the use of the index for quick lookup and leaves the MySQL server doing a full table scan or full index scan.
If you were using Oracle (that is, if you worked for a formerly wealthy employer) you could use function indexes. As it is you have to add some extra columns or some other helping data to accelerate your search.
Your smartest move is to split your first and last names into separate columns. Several other people have pointed out good reasons for doing that.
If you can't do that you could try creating an extra column which contains the name string reversed, and create an index on that column. That column will have, for example, 'John Smith' stored as 'htimS nhoJ'. Then you can search as follows.
WHERE nameReversed LIKE CONCAT(REVERSE('ith'),'%')
This search will use the index and be decently fast. I've had good success with it.
Problem
My user table has a column "name" which contains information like this: ``` Joe Lee Angela White ``` I want to search for either first name or last name efficiently. First name is easy, I can do ``` SELECT * FROM user WHERE name LIKE "ABC%" ``` But for last name, if I do ``` SELECT * FROM user WHERE name LIKE "%ABC" ``` That would be extremely slow. So I am thinking about counting the characters of the input, for example, "ABC" has 3 characters, and if I can search only the last three characters in name column, that would be great. So I want something like ``` SELECT * FROM user WHERE substring(name, end-3, end) LIKE "ABC%" ``` Is there anything in MySQL that can do this? Thanks so much! PS. I cannot do fulltext because our search engine doesn't support that.