Rails has provision to provide order of indexing on a column for better performance of like queries. The varchar_pattern_ops improves the performance of like queries by 4 times i.e 4x. For example, lets have this like query on name column (that has sequential index.) Select * from users where name like 'John%' We might have added a regular Rails index in migration for this name column as add_index :users, :name - This will generate a sequential index. The same can be made 4 times faster using btree index by adding xxx_pattern_ops options add_index