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Asked: 2026-05-12T15:00:52+00:00

I have a column in a non-partitioned Oracle table defined as VARCHAR2(50); the column

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I have a column in a non-partitioned Oracle table defined as VARCHAR2(50); the column has a standard b-tree index. I was wondering if there is an optimal way to query this column to determine whether it contains a given value. Here is the current query:

SELECT * FROM my_table m WHERE m.my_column LIKE '%'||v_value||'%';

I looked at Oracle Text, but that seems like overkill for such a small column. However, there are millions of records in this table so looking for substring matches is taking more time than I’d like. Is there a better way?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You have three choices:

    The simplest way to redefine the problem is to say the column has to start with the search term (so lose the first %), which will then use the index.

    An alternative way is to say that the search starts on word boundaries (so “est” will match “estimate” but not “test”). MySQL (MyISAM) and SQL Server have functions that will do matching like this. Not sure if Oracle does. If it doesn’t you could create a lookup table of words to search instead of the column itself and you could populate that table on a trigger.

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