Optimising “Ends With” searches with REVERSE

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Optimising “Ends With” searches with REVERSE

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Jeff Moden

Posted Wednesday, January 13, 2010 9:09 AM

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Jeff Moden (1/13/2010)

Don't get me started on what a poor metric the number of 'logical reads is'

Heh... now you know why I couched it all in "It Depends". Hehe

Between that and the crud that shows up in the execution plan....

--Jeff Moden

"RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for "Row-By-Agonizing-Row".

First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
Stop thinking about what you want to do to a row... think, instead, of what you want to do to a column."

For better, quicker answers on T-SQL questions, click on the following...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Best+Practices/61537/

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Post #846985

Jeff Moden

Posted Wednesday, January 13, 2010 9:10 AM

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peter-757102 (1/13/2010)

Note that indexes can only have a limited width (300 bytes or so , I believe).

Because of this, it makes sense to do a reverse of only the last N characters and limit the length of the search text to match. If your strings have varying lengths between 3 and 250 characters and your search strings are strict enough with 12 characters, add a few extra and use the reverse of the rightmost 16 characters to put the index on and truncate the search string to 16 characters as well.

This saves you a ton of otherwise unneeded duplicate data and keeps the number of page reads to a minimum.

It's actually 900 bytes for an index but very good point especially if you need to do it often.

--Jeff Moden

Post #846989

Jeff Moden

Posted Wednesday, January 13, 2010 9:13 AM

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Rome1981 (1/13/2010)

I was just about to post the same. Good to know there are people testing these solutions/examples.

Jeff- That is very good advice, I did not know that.

Thanks for the feedback. They key is that you have to look, though. Like Paul says, "Logical Reads" isn't the best and most reliable parametric and execution plans can lie like a rug.

--Jeff Moden

Post #846993

Peter Brase

Posted Wednesday, January 13, 2010 9:18 AM

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Thanks for this, an excellent tip! I discovered that even if you skip the extra column and just run the reverse query, i.e., "where reverse(fieldname) like 'cba%'" instead of "where fieldname like '%abc'" the response time improves by 50%.

Post #846999

JJ B

Posted Wednesday, January 13, 2010 9:28 AM

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What great timing for this article!

I'm just finishing up the design for an application that involves a "call module". This module is a place for users to record various data about phone calls that come into our agency. One of the features in the application is that the users need to be able to look up (search) records by the caller's phone number.

For various reasons, when entering the phone number data, users will have to enter the full phone number, including an area code. Ex: (541)444-5555.

However, the VAST majority of phone numbers that our users will enter or see will have the same area code. So, I've been playing with the idea of adding a feature where staff only have to enter the last 7 digits when doing a search.

I've been reluctant to implement such a feature for a couple reasons, one of which is precisely because I didn't want to have a WHERE clause such as:
WHERE phone like '%444-5555'
Yuck.

This article has given me a technique that makes that feature more palatable. I understand Jeff's caution. Even so, I'm excited about this idea because I think it might be perfect for the situation in my application. Thanks.

(The reason I explained my situation in detail is because I thought it might be helpful to provide a real-world example of when this need might come into play. If I didn't have such a need myself right now, I would not have been able to think of a realistic example of why anyone would really want to provide a "search the end" feature for users.)

Post #847014

john.arnott

Posted Wednesday, January 13, 2010 9:54 AM

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Bravo! Excellent example of explaining a technique that, once understood, seems so very natural. And, once again the discussion adds tremendously by making it clear that this is a "pay me now or pay me later" situation (absorb the overhead of index maintenance in favor of faster queries) and by suggesting improvements like Peter's (make the computed column only the last N characters of the search column).

Articles and discussions like this have made SSC my favorite web site (edging out ESPN.com).
=============
edit: fix minor typo

Post #847041

johnzabroski

Posted Wednesday, January 13, 2010 11:42 AM

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You can circumvent the max index key size

http://blogs.msdn.com/anthonybloesch/archive/2009/11/23/implementing-uniqueness-constraints-on-large-columns.aspx

Post #847104

SQLRNNR

Posted Wednesday, January 13, 2010 12:40 PM

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Jeff, Paul and others have made some excellent comments. I think this was a nice article. It certainly opens up avenues of thinking for any who might need to refine similar situations.

Jason AKA CirqueDeSQLeil
I have given a name to my pain...
MCM SQL Server 2008

SQL RNNR

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Post #847133

ben-564110

Posted Thursday, January 14, 2010 4:33 AM

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Peter Brase (1/13/2010)

Hi Peter,

Depending on how you measured that response time I'd be a little bit wary of that test. It might be simply that the first time you ran the query, the pages returned were kept in the SQL cache, and then when the second query was run (which would return exactly the same rows/pages) the data came straight from the cache and was therefore quicker.

Regards,
Ben

Post #847450

Calvin Lawson

Posted Friday, January 15, 2010 2:09 AM

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Thanks Ben, great idea for when you absolutely have to have those fast lookups with wildcards at the beginning of the search term. Which happens more often then one might think...

One small point; for the sake of code clarity, I would do something like this:

SELECT NAME FROM TEST_TABLE WHERE NAME_REVERSED LIKE REVERSE('%ID')

Signature is NULL

Post #848134

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