Question

Taking a PHP array of terms with variable length (i.e. it could be 50 terms, it could be 400), what’s the most efficient way of searching my database for each of these terms?

The search I’m trying to do is quite straightforward. For each term, I’d like to do:

SELECT id, post_title FROM wp_posts WHERE post_title LIKE %term%

Obviously I can run a foreach in PHP and run multiple MySQL queries, but I’d imagine this to be hugely inefficient.

The code I’ve most recently tried involves multiple OR statements, but with ~100ish terms it appears to run very slowly.

I have no idea if something like this would work?

SELECT id, post_title FROM wp_posts WHERE post_title LIKE %term1%, %term2%, %term3%, %term4%, [...]

Can I use a more efficient SQL statement, or should I be looking at this in a different way?

Answer 1

Stock MySQL could handle this kind of search using

MATCH (post_title) AGAINST ('term1 term2 term3 term4')

To do this search you will need to add Full Text index into the table using

ALTER TABLE wp_posts ADD FULLTEXT INDEX ft_key1(post_title);

This would be way faster than LIKE %term%, but please note that Full-Text indexes are only supported in MyISAM tables (InnoDB supported this syntax since MySQL 5.6).

However as your data grow bundled MySQL search speed might become an issue. In this case I would suggest to use external search engine like Solr or Sphinx.

If you decided to switch to Sphinx you may want to take a look on this guide http://astellar.com/2011/12/replacing-mysql-full-text-search-with-sphinx/