Mike,
> I have a fairly large table with a char(20) field in it which I search on
> quite a bit. The problem is that I tend to do a lot of
> "...where field like '%-d%'" type searches on this field.
>
> Is there any to speed up this type of search?
Yes. See the tsearch module in /contrib in your postgresql source.
--
-Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco