>>I have tables with more than four million rows and have used that syntax and haven't run into timeouts. Admittedly, I have a few procedures where I'll split it up into multiple queries, to limit the # of rows where the LIKE '%Value%' is used - but regardless, haven't run into timeout problems.
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>How big if your field length? Do you have a lot of words in those? Also, have you combined such search with several fields? Because, in our case, the user has about 17 fields on the form so combining such search would other fields would be catastrophic. Also, how long does your search result take? If this is under the Web, you are probably looking at an almost instant result.

Much larger than 30 characters, and yes. Truthfully the only times I've ever been involved in text searches is when paragraphs of text (resume text, contract and terms and condition text, etc.) were stored.

Still kind of curious about the actual values in that VehicleModel column. Since it's 30 characters - are you only storing entity values (actual model names) , or are you also storing miscellaneous text you want to search on? Is it a case where a single row could have multiple vehicle models?

I actually work on a database where we have vehicle platforms, program codes, name plates, mnemonic codes, etc. It's for a provider that works with many auto companies. We have a couple of 1-many tables. Unless you have miscellaneous text within those 30 characters, above and beyond standard vehicle models, I'm trying to understand why text searches would be needed.