Find best matching row in MySQL (InnoDB)

Question

I have the following test string engine/mail/key and a table which looks like this:

+-------------+
| query       |
+-------------+
| engine            


        

Answer 1

Just use LIKE, but the other way around to what your probably used to.

select query
from table1
where 'engine/mail/key' like concat(query,'%')
order by length(query) desc
limit 1

Results:

mysql> select * from query;
+-------------+
| query       |
+-------------+
| engine      | 
| engine/pdf  | 
| engine/mail | 
+-------------+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> select query from query 
       where 'engine/mail/key' like concat(query,'%') 
       order by length(query) desc 
       limit 1;
+-------------+
| query       |
+-------------+
| engine/mail | 
+-------------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)