Question

If your goal is to test if a string exists in a MySQL column (of type ‘varchar’, ‘text’, ‘blob’, etc) which of the following is faster / more efficient / better to use, and why?

Or, is there some other method that tops either of these?

INSTR( columnname, 'mystring' ) > 0

vs

columnname LIKE '%mystring%'

Answer 1

FULLTEXT searches are absolutely going to be faster, as kibibu noted in the comments above.

However:

mysql> select COUNT(ID) FROM table WHERE INSTR(Name,'search') > 0;
+-----------+
| COUNT(ID) |
+-----------+
|     40735 | 
+-----------+
1 row in set (5.54 sec)

mysql> select COUNT(ID) FROM table WHERE Name LIKE '%search%';
+-----------+
| COUNT(ID) |
+-----------+
|     40735 | 
+-----------+
1 row in set (5.54 sec)

In my tests, they perform exactly the same. They are both case-insensitive, and generally they perform full-table scans, a general no-no when dealing with high-performance MySQL.

Unless you are doing a prefix search on an indexed column:

mysql> select COUNT(ID) FROM table WHERE Name LIKE 'search%';
+-----------+
| COUNT(ID) |
+-----------+
|         7 | 
+-----------+
1 row in set (3.88 sec)

In which case, the LIKE with only a suffix wildcard is much faster.