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

REGEXP and LIKE are used to totally different cases.

LIKE is used to add wildcards to a string whereas REGEXP is used to match an attribute with Regular Expressions.

In your case a firstname is more likely to be matched using LIKE than REGEXP and hence, it will be more optimized.

Answer 2

If you can use LIKE instead of REGEXP, use LIKE

Answer 3

Better Use of LIKE Query instead of REGEXP if you are not sure about value.

Also LIKE is much faster than REGEXP.

Answer 4

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.