MySQL | REGEXP VS Like

Question

I have a table CANDIDATE in my db which is running under MySQL 5.5 and I am trying to get rows from table where RAM is contains in firstname, so I can run below two queries,

Answer 1

I've tried it out on MySQL 8.0.13 and compared LIKE vs REGEXP on a table with 1M+ rows on a column with an index:

SELECT * FROM table WHERE column LIKE '%foobar%';

Query took 10.0418 seconds.

SELECT * FROM table WHERE REGEXP_LIKE(column, 'foobar');

Query took 11.0742 seconds.

LIKE performance is faster. If you can get away with using it instead of REGEXP, do it.