opinions needed: INDEX FULLTEXT

admin

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Hi everyone.

I'd like to know if any of you has experienced drawbacks/problems with the FULLTEXT type of index. But let me give you some background first:
I'm working on a Content Management System. The texts stored in mySQL should be searchable. Now I don't claim to fully understand how MySQL uses Indexes but I understand that (sub-)indexes on VARCHAR or TEXT fields have no use on queries like "... WHERE content LIKE '%$searchstring%'"

This is completely reasonable to me.

On one hand that means that when the column 'content' stores only a single word (like in a keywordlist) I can use a subindex in combination with "WHERE content LIKE '$searchstring%'". That's fine for me.

On the other hand it means that on a large number of texts in the database a true fulltext search will become too slow since a subindex would be useless and mySQL would scan the whole dataset.

Now I've read about the FULLTEXT type of index that allowes me to do a case-insensitive wordsearch on columns. Fine.

The first disadvantage I discovered is that only true words will be found but not subwords. Thus if a text contains "automobile" and I search for "auto" it will not be found. Can this be solved?
Are there other problems with FULLTEXT indexes?

As always thx in advance,

Dominique
 
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