Question

When a user tries to search for people on our system, we’ve noticed that they often type a full name for their search.
How can we enable full name searching on our database when first name and last name are stored in different columns?

Answer 1

A working but neither fast nor reliable solution would be:

SELECT foo
FROM   bar
WHERE  CONCAT(firstname, ' ', lastname) = $search_name

(Not sure about MySQL CONCAT syntax atm, you might need to concat twice)

There is a high chance that this won’t use any indexes, slowing down the search a lot.

A better solution would be to just split the name:

$names = explode(' ', $search_name);

SELECT foo
FROM   bar
WHERE  firstname = $names[0]
AND    lastname  = $names[1]

Even better:
Provide two input boxes and label them first and lastname so users will enter the search correctly.