Question

I use InnoDB on RDS, which unfortunately does not yet support MySQL full text search. I’m therefore looking into alternatives. My app is on Heroku and I have considered the various addons that provide search capabilities, but have a very large table of companies (~100M records) and I think that they are prohibitively expensive. I only need to be able to search one field on the table — company name.

I am therefore considering creating my own ‘keyword’ table. Essentially this would list every word contained in every company name. There would then be another table that shows association between these keywords and the company_id.

1. Does this sound like a good idea? Are there any better alternatives?

2. What would be the most efficient way of creating the keyword table and the association table? I’d like to do it using T-SQL, if possible.

Answer 1

You can do it, and it’s far better than using LIKE '%word%' queries.

But it’s not nearly as good as using proper fulltext indexing.

See my presentation Full Text Search Throwdown, where I compare the fulltext solutions for MySQL, including trigrams, which is approximately like the keyword solution you’re considering.

The fastest solution — by far — was Sphinx Search.