On Wed, 31 Dec 2003 11:52:48 +0000 (UTC), dcabbar wrote:

> Actually, what I really want is the full-text search portion, and
> fuzzy match is just the part of it. i.e. searching for a specified
> word in a varchar column. And, as you know using "like %word%" is
> pretty expensive.
> So, is there at least any add-on that is available? Any
> ideas/comments/experience on this?

There are commercial tools for this. Also, if you are using IBO you can
use the facilities there (available as a separate component set). Text
search has been discussed on these NG's, and not long ago someone said he
might consider making his solution available (commercial, I believe).


Sometime in 2002, Art Metz wrote a paper on his experiences, concluding with
<<
I suspect that the combination of Rubicon, the TIBO* components, and
InterBase would work fine for a text database with relatively infrequent
changes (say, one insert per second). This is a very common scenario, as
exemplified by Web searches on Yahoo and databases of newsgroup
archives. In these circumstances, Rubicon is an easy way to get complex
search capabilities to work quickly.
However, in my project, the combination failed completely. I spent seven
workdays trying to get anything to work. Even then it worked badly and the
overhead was unacceptable. In contrast, the home-grown search technique
took only one day to implement and works fine.

>>

YMMV ...


It would be great if some "word indexing feature" were included in
Firebird. A similar feature in dbISAM seems to work fine, and takes much
of the tedium out of the work.

I'm using a homegrown system in an Fb database, but it took some work to
get it going. I don't really like to do much programming parsing strings
etc. in char/varchar/blob in SP's and are therefore doing some of the work
on the client. This doesn't make for very snappy response over slow
connections (e.g. Internet).


--
Aage J.