What's the fastest way to make a multiple field search in MySQL?
I'm trying to achieve a really fast search engine for a MySQL db with several fields.

The problem relies on the fact that I need to match a value (keyword) against several fields, in a %like% approach. 

I don't mind relevancy (the order is fixed), just performance. The queries are pretty complicated (lotta JOINS, 3 or 4 tables per query).

At first I thought of **MATCH ... AGAINST**, but I don't think it's a good idea to make so much FULLTEXT indexes. Maybe with PHP-generated **OR LIKE %value%**, but... is it really efficent?

Any ideas?
What's the fastest way to make a multiple field search in MySQL?
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I'm trying to achieve a really fast search engine for a MySQL db with several fields.

The problem relies on the fact that I need to match a value (keyword) against several fields, in a %like% approach. 

I don't mind relevancy (the order is fixed), just performance. The queries are pretty complicated (lotta JOINS, 3 or 4 tables per query).

At first I thought of **MATCH ... AGAINST**, but I don't think it's a good idea to make so much FULLTEXT indexes. Maybe with PHP-generated **OR LIKE %value%**, but... is it really efficent?

Any ideas?