optimize tag autocompletion

[jywarren]

Maybe by selecting fewer fields and/or sorting differently?

[btbonval]

If tags aren't already indexed by string name, we should do that:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/create-index.html

CREATE INDEX tag_name_index
ON node_tag (name DESC)
USING BTREE;

or some such. Apparently MyISAM and InnoDB only support BTREE, so that doesn't need to be specified, and ASC/DESC is presently ignored by MySQL so that can be omitted as well.

Unsure how to add index using Rails migrations, but that'd probably be best.

This will optimize string searches against tags in the database. That should help autocompletion by speeding up the time to sort through the strings in the tag table.

[ananyo2012]

I think this can be closed now. Here is the code that finds tag suggestions https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/blob/master/app/controllers/tag_controller.rb#L172-L175 Presently tags are queried by matching the tagname and upto a maximum of 10 tag suggestions

[jywarren]

Here are the existing indices -- and I think we'll be relying on the solr search system for tag searches in the future, so I think we'll be OK to close this either way -- but curious if the name-based index here does the trick:

https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/blob/master/db/schema.rb.example#L371-L373