I'm working with a Postgres database that I have no control over the administration of. I'm building a calendar that deals with seeing if resources (physical items) were online or offline on a specific day. Unfortunately, if they're offline I can only confirm this by finding the resource name in a text field.
I've been using
select * from log WHERE log_text LIKE 'Resource Kit 06%'
The problem is that when we're building a calendar using LIKE 180+ times (at least 6 resources per day) is slow as can be. Does anybody know of a way to speed this up (keep in mind I can't modify the database). Also, if there's nothing I can do on the database end, is there anything I can do on the php end?
I think, that some form of cache will be required for this. As you cannot change anything in database, your only chance is to pull data from it and store it in some more accessible and faster form. This is highly dependent on frequency of data inserted into table. If there are more inserts than selects, it will not probably help much. Other way there is slight chance of improved performance.
Maybe you can consider using Lucene search engine, which is capable of fulltext indexing. There is implementation from Zend and even Apache has some http service. I haven't opportunity to test it however.
If you don't use something that robust, you can write your own caching mechanism in php. It will not be as fast as postgres, but probably faster than not indexed LIKE queries. If your queries need to be more sofisticated (conditions, grouping, ordering...), you can use SQLite database, which is file based and doesn't need extra service running on server.
Another way could be using triggers in database, which could on insert data store required information to some other table in more indexed manner. But without rights to administer database, it is probably dead end.
Please be more specific with your question, if you want more specific information.