At 09:35 AM 21/06/2007, Adam wrote:

> > > That's not the right answer. Could you review the question and
> > > answer that question? I want to understand what your "fuzzy
> > search"
> > > is actually supposed to achieve. Otherwise, I give up.
>
>Helen,
>
>The inability of Firebird to handle more than 1499 terms in an in
>statement is surely a limitation (from my understanding it is an
>implementation artifact that was quite hard to change, not a design
>choice).

Adam, I'm not trying to imply an argument here, merely trying to find
out what Stephen wanted to achieve by those ambiguous and apparently
superfluous subqueries in the example that kicked all of this off
some days ago.

Whether a hard limit on literals in an IN() predicate is a Good Thing
or a Bad Thing (or even what the purpose of the hard limit might be)
is a Red Herring and is not the reason for wanting a proper answer to
the question - which has since been answered by the person to whom I
asked it. I simply want to understand the logic of what Stephen
wants to achieve because it seems his so far unsuccessful techniques
owe their problems to more than one thing, including bad syntax and
some underlying structural defects in the tables.

I'm working on a non-trivial response in the hope of offering
something practicable to solve it.

./heLen