5.15 Using FULLTEXT Searches Problem You want to search through a lot of text. Solution Use a FULLTEXT index. Discussion You can use pattern matches to look through any number of rows, but as the amount of text goes up, the match operation can become quite slow. It's also common to look for the same text in several string columns, which with pattern matching tends to result in unwieldy queries: SELECT * from tbl_name WHERE col1 LIKE 'pat' OR col2 LIKE 'pat' OR col3 LIKE 'pat' ... A useful alternative is FULLTEXT searching, which is designed for looking through large amounts of text and can search multiple columns simultaneously. To use this capabil- ity, add a FULLTEXT index to your table, and then use the MATCH operator to look for strings in the indexed column or columns. FULLTEXT indexing can be used with MyISAM tables for nonbinary string data types ( CHAR , VARCHAR , or TEXT ).