Question

I use the following call for getting information from a database:

select * 
from submissions 
where 
   match( description ) against ('+snowboard' in boolean mode ) 
   and (!disabled or disabled='n') 
order by datelisted desc limit 30

Which means everything with ‘snowboard’ in the description is found. Now here’s the problem:

select *
from submissions 
where 
  match( description ) against ('+snowboard +mp4' in boolean mode ) 
  and (!disabled or disabled='n') 
order by datelisted desc limit 30

will ignore the +mp4 for some reason and return the same as the first query

select * 
from submissions 
where 
   match( description ) against ('+mp4' in boolean mode ) 

doesn’t return anything, so basically it appears it’s ignored in the search

Does anybody know how to work around this behavior?

Answer 1

mysql’s boolean mode will only match words which are longer than a certain length. and mp4 is too short. you’d have to recompile mysql to change the threshold

EDIT: turns out, this can now be set via the config file, see http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-fine-tuning.html for furhter reference