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SQLite: How to efficiently filter a large dataset with multiple OR conditions in a query?

šŸ‘€ Views: 14 šŸ’¬ Answers: 1 šŸ“… Created: 2025-06-12
sqlite performance query-optimization SQL

I'm sure I'm missing something obvious here, but I'm maintaining legacy code that Could someone explain Could someone explain This might be a silly question, but I've searched everywhere and can't find a clear answer... I'm working on an SQLite database with a large table containing millions of records, and I need to filter data based on multiple OR conditions. The query I’m currently using looks something like this: ```sql SELECT * FROM my_table WHERE column_a = 'value1' OR column_b = 'value2' OR column_c = 'value3'; ``` While this works, the performance is quite poor, and the query takes a long time to execute. I've tried creating indexes on the columns involved in the conditions, but it doesn't seem to improve the situation significantly. Here's the index creation command I used: ```sql CREATE INDEX idx_columns ON my_table(column_a, column_b, column_c); ``` Still, the execution time is unacceptably high. I even considered rewriting the query to use UNION with separate SELECT statements, but I'm unsure if that would help or if it would complicate things further. I've also checked the database schema, and it looks fine with no unnecessary constraints that could slow down the queries. Currently, I'm using SQLite version 3.32.1. Does anyone have suggestions on how to optimize this query or handle multiple OR conditions more efficiently in SQLite? Any insights on whether using UNION might provide a performance boost would also be appreciated. Any ideas what could be causing this? My development environment is Windows. Has anyone else encountered this? What's the best practice here? My team is using Sql for this desktop app. Any examples would be super helpful. Has anyone dealt with something similar? I recently upgraded to Sql latest.