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Does anybody know what the performance of using substring in MySQL is like? I have some insert and update calls where I have to truncate all the fields (up to around 15) using substring statements. These will get call pretty regularly so I'm a little worried about performance.

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  • Could you provide more detail about what you're doing? I'm interested to know why you're planning on repeatedly truncating text Commented Sep 8, 2010 at 0:29
  • If you have to trim text, becuase it's part of some ETL process say, then you have to trim text, whether or not it performs badly! Commented Sep 8, 2010 at 0:33

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Intensive string handling in SQL generally performs relatively poorly (it's not what SQL was designed for).

But you should first profile to make sure you actually have a bottleneck.

[If you were using MS SQL Server, then any complex string handling (like regular expression matching) should probably use a CLR stored procedure.]

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5 Comments

@Mitch - I took the liberty of removing a couple of superfluous T's left behind!
yeah sorry I was pretty implicit with it being in my tag only
@Martin Smith: TSQL is a standard, isn't it? but if it's not thanks! :)
do you have a reference or an explanation for why SQL performs poorly at intensive string handling?
@stevebot: it's from experience. But you can quickly write some small tests to verify...

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