Question

I have a simple but huge table called ‘dictionary’ which has 2 columns. Id and word.
I have a php anagram algorithm tha creates all possible combinations of a given word. I want to chech if that word exists in my dictionary and if yes display it. But i have to use too many queries. For example a 9 letter word is 362880 combinations. Any idea of how to make fewer db calls?

Answer 1

Try something like this for only one query, although I don’t know how efficient such a query will be:

$possibilities = array( "at", "ta");
$sql = 'SELECT * FROM dictionary_table 
            WHERE word IN ("' . implode( '", "', $possibilities) . '")';

This will generate the SQL query:

SELECT * FROM dictionary_table 
            WHERE word IN ("at", "ta")

The upside is that the query is dynamic, so no matter how many $possibilities there are, this would theoretically work. For efficiency, I would definitely index the word column.