Originally Posted by Village Idiot

If you are looking for a raw piece of text, it might be faster to search raw text, but it will without a doubt be more memory intensive because those functions tend to load it all into memory. If you are looking for anything more advanced than that, a database is probably your best bet.

You see, searching through raw text looks though every bit of it, SQL uses more advanced techniques so it doesn't have to do such a low level comparison.