Re: Searching values all-over the database
Joachim Engel wrote: > is there a smart way to search any value all-over the database > regardless in which column it is stored? No. Codd proposed some such mechanism in his RM/V2 book in 1990, but the output result from his FAO (find all occurrences) operator has a lot of problems. > We are using IDS 7.31. Why do you think this is needed? What have you lost? Is there an SQL DBMS that provides this functionality? Any other type of DBMS? -- Jonathan Leffler #include <disclaimer.h> Email: jleffler@earthlink.net, jleffler@us.ibm.com Guardian of DBD::Informix v2005.02 -- http://dbi.perl.org/
Hi Jonathan, > No. Codd proposed some such mechanism in his RM/V2 book in 1990, but > the output result from his FAO (find all occurrences) operator has a lot > of problems. what a pity. > > We are using IDS 7.31. > > Why do you think this is needed? Sorry, it's a customer requirement. > What have you lost? Me, nothing. But I got a personal organizer based on a own database, which can retrieve infos regardless of storage location. > Is there an SQL > DBMS that provides this functionality? I'm not quite sure ... what is about Microsoft SQL Server Full-text Search or retrieval systems? > Any other type of DBMS? Over 15 years ago I build that with a clipper database. Full table and column scan, but it was amazing fast! Kind regards Joachim Engel.
Joachim Engel wrote: > Hi Jonathan, <SNIP> > >> Any other type of DBMS? > > > Over 15 years ago I build that with a clipper database. > Full table and column scan, but it was amazing fast! And you could write it again over your Informix database. It wasn't the underlying dBaseIV database that was providing the database wide search capability - YOU were in your code. Feel free to do it again and with the ability to read the database's catalog you can even tell where to look, whereas in the dBaseIV database you had to KNOW where to look when you wrote the program and you had to modify it to support new items. In Informix and most other relational DBMSs you can support tables and columns that don't even exist yet if you write your search app correctly. Art S. Kagel