Strategies/Methods for doing text matching

I'm trying to look for rows that match a text input in a table like this:

where description like '%search query here%'

I know that can be painfully slow - so what strategies can be used to speed that up for wide columns on large data sets?

 

You can use FULLTEXT capability of database like in MySQL. you can also consider Sphinx engine if you are doing this on a huge scale.

 

You can probably create an index. Try to index the field that you are using to search. It will somewhat help in the speed since indexing autosort the records.

 

Index is of no use for wildcard searches mentioned above.