>Is there a way to optimize a select when looking for substrings ($) of a character field. A table (500,000+ records) on a LAN with an index on UPPER(ALLTRIM(somefield)) is acceptably fast when we do this...
>
>SELECT * FROM sometable WHERE ;
>UPPER(ALLTRIM(somefield)) = UPPER(ALLTRIM(variable))
>
>... but if we ...
>
>SELECT * FROM sometable WHERE ;
>UPPER(ALLTRIM(variable)) $ UPPER(ALLTRIM(somefield))
>
>... it is horribly slow. Any suggestions on how to speed that up?
>
>Thank you.
First of all, you should not have an index on alltrim(something), since this will give you a variable expression length. VFP doesn't support this, and it will put an almost arbitrary length (actually based on the first record it finds, I think).
Queries on "$" are fairly difficult to roptimize. You might want some utility like phdBASE that creates an index on each word.
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