Partial searches over a lot of fields

Hi All,
I have the following scenario. I have a table called Invoice. This
has around 30 columns of which i have to do a retrieval based on
filter conditions on 10 columns. These filters need to be partial
searches i.e. for e.g the Customer name could be 'Arun', 'Parthiv',
'Aaron', now i should be able to search the customer as 'ar' and it
should return 'Arun' and 'Parthiv'. My concern is there are 10 columns
on which this like '%x%' search has to be done and there will
practically be hudreds of thousands of rows. can anybody suggest me to
improve the performance of such a query. Currently what i am thinkin
of is
select Id, Memo, .. FROM Invoice where CustomerName like '%' + @.Name +
'%' and etc.
P.S. am using ASP.Net as the front end.ArunPrakash (arunprakashb@.yahoo.com) writes:
> I have the following scenario. I have a table called Invoice. This
> has around 30 columns of which i have to do a retrieval based on
> filter conditions on 10 columns. These filters need to be partial
> searches i.e. for e.g the Customer name could be 'Arun', 'Parthiv',
> 'Aaron', now i should be able to search the customer as 'ar' and it
> should return 'Arun' and 'Parthiv'. My concern is there are 10 columns
> on which this like '%x%' search has to be done and there will
> practically be hudreds of thousands of rows. can anybody suggest me to
> improve the performance of such a query. Currently what i am thinkin
> of is
> select Id, Memo, .. FROM Invoice where CustomerName like '%' + @.Name +
> '%' and etc.

You can use SELECT TOP or SET ROWCOUNT to restrict the number of rows
returned. A good value is probably 2000. If you get 2000 rows, you tell
the user to refine his conditions.

Also keep in mind, that there could be a great difference in performance
when searching for names that start with 'Ar', or have 'ar' anywhere in
the name. If the search column is indexed, that index can be used
for the case "starts with", but not "contains".

There are also a couple of considerations of how to compose the query
to make the search effective. You may be interested in the article
http://www.sommarskog.se/dyn-search.html on my web site.

--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel@.sommarskog.se

Books Online for SQL Server SP3 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/techin.../2000/books.asp