I'm storing a lot of words in a database. What's the fastest format for finding them? I'm going to be doing a lot of WHERE w LIKE 'marsh%' and WHERE w IN ('m', 'ma'). All characters are lowercase a-z, no punctuation, no other alphabets. By default I'm using varchar in utf-8 encoding, but was wondering if I could specificy something else (perhaps 7bit ascii, perhaps lowercase only) that would speed things up even further.