How to SELECT in SQL where the field contains words?

Richard C.

—August 15, 2023

The Problem

We can SELECT rows with fields containing an exact match in SQL.

SELECT * FROM Poem WHERE Line = 'Life is but a dream boat down the stream.';

But how do we perform a more complex search, where a line may contain all or any words or phrases, in different order?

Let’s use a simple table with four text rows as an example. This code works on SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.

CREATE TABLE Poem
(
    Line VARCHAR(100)
);

INSERT INTO Poem (Line)
VALUES ('Row, row, merrily row your boat,'),
       ('Dream gently down the stream.'),
       ('Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,'),
       ('Life is but a dream boat down the stream.');

The Solution

To use partial matching instead of exact matching in SQL, we use the LIKE keyword. Here is an example query and its result.

SELECT *
FROM Poem
WHERE
    Line LIKE '%ow%';

-- Row, row, merrily row your boat,
-- Dream gently down the stream.
-- Life is but a dream boat down the stream.

The % sign is a wildcard, meaning that any text can be on either side of the letters ow. So this query will match down and row, and the rest of the containing line.

If you instead used LIKE 'ow', no results would be returned because no line contains only that word.

Lines Must Contain All Words

If you’re looking to find the lines that contain both dream and boat you have to use an AND statement.

SELECT *
FROM Poem
WHERE
    Line LIKE '%boat%' AND
    Line LIKE '%Dream%';

-- Life is but a dream boat down the stream.

Lines Must Contain Any Words

Similarly, you can use OR to find lines that contain at least one of the words you are looking for. The following code will return every line of the poem.

SELECT *
FROM Poem
WHERE
    Line LIKE '%merrily%' OR
    Line LIKE '%down%';

Collations and Case-Sensitivity

Notice that SQL usually ignores case in fields. Here Dream was uppercase in a query but lowercase in the line found.

However, this depends on your SQL installation. In PostgreSQL, you have to use ILIKE (“insensitive like”) instead of LIKE.

SELECT *
FROM Poem
WHERE
    Line ILIKE '%dream%'

If you want to be sure that your column is case-insensitive, you can specify the column’s collation explicitly.

SQL Server:

CREATE TABLE Poem
(
    Line VARCHAR(100) COLLATE Latin1_General_CI_AI
);

MySQL:

CREATE TABLE Poem
(
    Line VARCHAR(100) COLLATE "utf8_general_ci"
);

Using Full-Text Indexes for Complex Queries

If the table you are querying contains thousands of long lines or you are using multiple AND and OR statements, performance will be very poor. You should rather create a full-text index on the column to improve the query’s speed. Using full-text search differs on each database server.

Note that full-text search looks for full words, related words, and other linguistic elements that consider punctuation, as opposed to a string of letters. In other words, the search functions at a higher level than using LIKE and may not give the results you expect.

SQL Server

In SQL Server, you need to install the full-text search component on your server and then restart the server. You then create a full-text catalog, which is a container for all your full-text indexes. You also need to ensure that the column you are indexing is UNIQUE and NOT NULL.

Create the table and index it.

CREATE TABLE Poem
(
    Line VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL
);

CREATE UNIQUE INDEX idx_Poem_Line ON Poem (Line);

CREATE FULLTEXT CATALOG ft_catalog AS DEFAULT;

CREATE FULLTEXT INDEX ON Poem (Line)
    KEY INDEX idx_Poem_Line ON ft_catalog;

INSERT INTO Poem (Line)
VALUES ('Row, row, merrily row your boat,'),
       ('Dream gently down the stream.'),
       ('Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,'),
       ('Life is but a dream boat down the stream.');

Query it using CONTAINS.

SELECT *
FROM Poem
WHERE CONTAINS (Line, 'dream AND down');

-- Dream gently down the stream.
-- Life is but a dream boat down the stream.

PostgreSQL

In PostgreSQL, you create a generalized inverted index (GIN).

CREATE TABLE Poem
(
    Line VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL
);

CREATE INDEX idx_poem_line_fts ON Poem USING gin(to_tsvector('english', Line));

Query it using the @@ operator.

SELECT *
FROM Poem
WHERE to_tsvector('english', Line) @@ to_tsquery('english', 'dream');

-- Dream gently down the stream.
-- Life is but a dream boat down the stream.

Both the indexes and queries in PostgreSQL can be complex. You can use full-word and partial-word indexes. Consult the documentation before you decide what index to create.

MySQL

In MySQL, you create the index using the FULLTEXT keyword.

CREATE TABLE Poem
(
    Line VARCHAR(100),
    FULLTEXT INDEX idx_poem_line_fts (Line)
);

Query it using MATCH.

SELECT *
FROM Poem
WHERE
    MATCH(Line) AGAINST('down dream');

-- Dream gently down the stream.
-- Life is but a dream boat down the stream.

If MATCH doesn’t give you the results you expect, you’ll need to research IN NATURAL LANGUAGE MODE, IN BOOLEAN MODE, stopwords, wildcards, minimum lengths, and punctuation.