Described are mechanisms for creating and utilizing a specialized index to improve the efficiency of various types of leading wildcard searches without having to unduly burden the system with write requests. The mechanisms may identify particular fields to be included in one or more types of specialized indexes that are accessed in response to particular types of wildcard queries including various combinations of leading, trailing, and intermediate wildcard operators. In addition, the mechanism may perform various pre-processing by an application when creating such indexes to conserve resources of an underlying database system. The mechanisms may also execute such wildcard queries in a manner that appears to be synchronous to a user while maintaining such indexes asynchronously for efficiency purposes.