Re: [GENERAL] Full Text Searches

On Sun, 23 May 1999, Andy Lewis wrote:

> Whats the possibility of having full text searches added to text fields?
>
> That would be awesome.....

Unfortunately, full text indexing is a different issue than the kind of
indexing performed on table columns, and if you want to do any kind of
efficient full text searching, you have to index the individual words in
the text or it'd be so slow as to be hardly useful (especially if you're
talking about 600,000 records with 2K of text in each text field).

Excalibur, for instance, creates its own internal indexing for full text
records, but uses an underlying SQL database for regular fielded data, and
when you design your database, you have to make the distinction about what
kind of indexing you want, stop words (words you don't want indexed, like
'the' and 'of'), and the way certain fields can or will be searched.

Brett W. McCoy
                                        http://www.lan2wan.com/~bmccoy/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
The six great gifts of an Irish girl are beauty, soft voice, sweet speech,
wisdom, needlework, and chastity.
        -- Theodore Roosevelt, 1907