Simon Willison’s Weblog

What is the most efficient way to lookup an object (e.g. a user) by only a string?

31st May 2012

My answer to What is the most efficient way to lookup an object (e.g. a user) by only a string? on Quora

Yes—an index on a varchar column is exactly how you would implement this.

Posted 31st May 2012 at 5:27 pm · Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter

More recent articles

Meta's new model is Muse Spark, and meta.ai chat has some interesting tools - 8th April 2026
Anthropic's Project Glasswing - restricting Claude Mythos to security researchers - sounds necessary to me - 7th April 2026
The Axios supply chain attack used individually targeted social engineering - 3rd April 2026

This is What is the most efficient way to lookup an object (e.g. a user) by only a string? by Simon Willison, posted on 31st May 2012.

mysql 81 twitter 161 urls 79 quora 1005

Next: Is there a single list of all tech conferences around the world?

Previous: Is there an API that returns metadata for a given URL?

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe