Is it faster to search for a large string in a DB by its hashcode?

Question

If I need to retrieve a large string from a DB, Is it faster to search for it using the string itself or would I gain by hashing the string and storing the hash in the DB as

Answer 1

Are you doing an equality match, or a containment match? For an equality match, you should let the db handle this (but add a non-clustered index) and just test via WHERE table.Foo = @foo. For a containment match, you should perhaps look at full text index.