I’m doing a search on a table (few inner joins) which takes max 5 seconds to run (7.5 million rows). It’s a MyISAM table and I’m not using full-text indexing on it as I found there to be no difference in speed when using MATCH AGAINST and a normal “like” statement in this case from what I can see.
I’m now “suffering” from locked tables and queries running for several minutes before they complete because of it.
Would it benefit me at all to try and switch the engine to InnoDB? Or does that only help if I need to insert or update rows… not just select them? This whole table-locking thing is busy grinding my balls…
The difference between row-level and table-level locking is only important for insert and update queries. If you’re mostly do selects (so the inserts/updates do not happen too often to lock the table) the difference will not be all that much (even though in recent benchmarks InnoDB seems to be outperforming MyISAM).
Other ways you could think about is to reorganise your data structure, perhaps including additional lookup table with ‘tags’ or ‘keywords’. Implementing more efficient full text engine as suggested by webdestroya.
Last but not least, I’m also surprised that you got similar results with FULL TEXT vs LIKE. This could happen if the fields you’re searching are not really wide, in which case maybe a stndard B-TREE index with = search would be enough?