Question

I added the jquery autocomplete plugin to my places textfield to help users better select a location. What I didn’t realize before building is that the query would be very slow.

select * from `geoplanet_places` where name LIKE "%San Diego%" AND (place_type = "County" OR place_type = "Town")

The query above took 1.18 seconds. Then I tried adding indexes for name and place_type but that only slowed it down (1.93s).

Is there a way to optimize this query or is there another technique to speed up the query.

This geoplanet_places table has 437,715 rows (mysql)

CREATE TABLE `geoplanet_places` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `woeid` bigint(20) default NULL,
  `parent_woeid` bigint(20) default NULL,
  `country_code` varchar(255) collate utf8_unicode_ci default NULL,
  `name` varchar(255) collate utf8_unicode_ci default NULL,
  `language` varchar(255) collate utf8_unicode_ci default NULL,
  `place_type` varchar(255) collate utf8_unicode_ci default NULL,
  `ancestry` varchar(255) collate utf8_unicode_ci default NULL,
  `activity_count` int(11) default '0',
  `activity_count_updated_at` datetime default NULL,
  `bounding_box` blob,
  `slug` varchar(255) collate utf8_unicode_ci default NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`),
  UNIQUE KEY `index_geoplanet_places_on_woeid` (`woeid`),
  KEY `index_geoplanet_places_on_ancestry` (`ancestry`),
  KEY `index_geoplanet_places_on_parent_woeid` (`parent_woeid`),
  KEY `index_geoplanet_places_on_slug` (`slug`),
  KEY `index_geoplanet_places_on_name` (`name`),
  KEY `index_geoplanet_places_on_place_type` (`place_type`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=5652569 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci;

EXPLAIN

id 1
select_type SIMPLE
table geoplanet_places
type    ALL
possible_keys   index_geoplanet_places_on_place_type
key NULL
key_len NULL
ref NULL
rows    441273
Extra   Using where

Answer 1

You can switch the storage engine of the table to MyISAM to take advantage of full text indexing.

The name index wont help you unless you change the like to LIKE 'San Diego%' which can do a prefix search on the index