Leyne, Sean,

>I believe that you are over-estimating the 3 seconds of time to
> calculate the results. Especially if you consider the required common
> properties, which will significantly reduce the brushes to be evaluated.

Yahh.. maybe you are right. I will setup a test for comparison in real time to see how it works.

> (Confirming, you did say that the table of brushes would contain 500,000
>items, right?)

Yah. Right now the database will have 500 000 brushes and will increase in the future because every time they identify a competitor brush or manufacturer brush, they will put it on the database. Therefore, in the future the database will have 1 million or more. I talk with the guys here and we are assuming 1.5 million the worst case.

>Also, while you may have 200 clients connected to the database, I can't
>believe that they all will be searching for matches simultaneously.

Well, in fact this is true because this is a sales software. This mean that every day sales team will use it to identify the brush and sell it. But this can be resolved by multiple databases. So each sales department have its own database and therefore just 10 clients will be accessing the database at the same time. Do you know if firebird has tools for maitain multiple databases synchronized?

>Is there any way to perform the similar-to search by looking for an
>exact match based on all the properties, and then dropping the match
>criteria based on an order of properties which have the least relevance
>for similarity.

Is not so simple. The objective of this search is identify my company brushes when you input competitor or manufacturer information of the brush. Sometimes is easy because you have all information, but most of the times you don't have anything. Just a competitor part number. So my job if provide all brushes that can be similar with the competitor brush.

>After all, you are looking for candidates which have the greatest
>similarity... not items which have a nominal similarity.

Yah. I want to list all brushes with similarity higher than 85 %. The user also has the option to select the minimum level between 85% and 100%.






---
Luís Carlos Dill Junges ©

"A realidade de cada lugar e de cada época é uma alucinação coletiva."
Bloom, Howard










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