Fastest way to find string by substring in SQL?

If you want to use less space than Randy's answer and there is considerable repetition in your data, you can create an N-Ary tree data structure where each edge is the next character and hang each string and trailing substring in your data on it.

You number the nodes in depth first order. Then you can create a table with up to 255 rows for each of your records, with the Id of your record, and the node id in your tree that matches the string or trailing substring. Then when you do a search, you find the node id that represents the string you are searching for (and all trailing substrings) and do a range search.

You can add another calculated column on the table: titleLength as len(title) PERSISTED. This would store the length of the "title" column. Create an index on this.

Also, add another calculated column called: ReverseTitle as Reverse(title) PERSISTED.

Now when someone searches for a keyword, check if the length of keyword is same as titlelength. If so, do a "=" search. If length of keyword is less than the length of the titleLength, then do a LIKE. But first do a title LIKE 'abc%', then do a reverseTitle LIKE 'cba%'. Similar to Brad's approach - ie you do the next difficult query only if required.

Also, if the 80-20 rules applies to your keywords/ substrings (ie if most of the searches are on a minority of the keywords), then you can also consider doing some sort of caching. For eg: say you find that many users search for the keyword "abc" and this keyword search returns records with ids 20, 22, 24, 25 - you can store this in a separate table and have this indexed. And now when someone searches for a new keyword, first look in this "cache" table to see if the search was already performed by an earlier user. If so, no need to look again in main table. Simply return results from "cache" table.

You can also combine the above with SQL Server TextSearch. (assuming you have a valid reason not to use it). But you could nevertheless use Text search first to shortlist the result set. and then run a SQL query against your table to get exact results using the Ids returned by the TExt Search as a parameter along with your keyword.

All this is obviously assuming you have to use SQL. If not, you can explore something like Apache Solr.