Question

G’day!

I have one million different words which I’d like to query for in a table with 15 million rows. The result of synonyms together with the word is getting processed after each query.

table looks like this:

    synonym      word     ---------------------     ancient      old     anile        old     centenarian  old     darkened     old     distant      far     remote       far     calm         gentle     quite        gentle 

This is how it is done in Java currently:

.... PreparedStatement stmt; ResultSet wordList; ResultSet syns; ...  stmt = conn.prepareStatement('select distinct word from table'); wordList = stmt.executeQuery();  while (wordList.next()) {     stmt = conn.prepareStatement('select synonym from table where word=?');     stmt.setString(1, wordList.getString(1));     syns = stmt.executeQuery();      process(syns, wordList.getString(1)); } ... 

This is incredible slow. What’s the fastest way to do stuff like this?

Cheers, Chris

Answer 1

Two ideas:

a) How about making it one query:

select synonym from table where word in (select distinct word from table) 

b) Or, if you process method needs to deal with them as a set of synonyms of one word, why not sort them by word and start process anew each time word is different? That query would be:

select word, synonym  from table  order by word