RE: database search question...

[Joel Fritz <JFritz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I think the file will work fine as long as you don't expect too much
intelligence from the application.  If you key it by token, the only
maintenence necessary should be when new products are added or descriptions
are changed.  You could do some things in your parsing logic to eliminate
tokens that aren't "useful" like articles and prepositions.  I hope "partial
word" doesn't mean abbreviations or matching by less than complete equality.
If they want something more sophisticated, you need match coding, which can
be a career.

We use something like this for product lookup over a similar sized file and
performance has always been subsecond.   


    -----Original Message-----
From: Hatzenbeler, Tim [mailto:thatzenbeler@clinitech.net]
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2001 1:20 PM
To: 'MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com'
Subject: database search question...


How does ebay do it?  And can the as/400 do it?  Or do I just need a super
fast computer with a ton of memory... 
The question is this.... 
I have a product file...  About 20,000 items... And I have end users who
want to be able to preform partial word searches on the description field...
Seems simple enough, but the problem is speed...
If I do an rpg program, that reads every line of the product file and does a
%scan function... It works, but its not very fast...
I could to an SQL with the  like '%fuzzy%' but even thats slow... and if
they gave it a real generic lookup value, it will take forever...


So my question is this, does any one have a suggestion?  My 1st thought is
something like this.   Program a word index creator, that  would run
nighlty.
Product catalog 
item#,description 
1234, big red car 
1235, little green car 
and then a lookup data base, would look like this 
search word, part# 
--------------------------- 
big,1234 
car,1234 
car,1235 
green,1235 
little,1235 
red,1234 
and then if someone wanted [little car], it would do a search on [little]
and [car] and if both are positive to the same key(item#), then pull that
record...
I'm hoping someone could think of a better way...  I'm hoping there is an
os/400 database command to solve this problem, so that's why i'm posting it
in this list.
If not, the index creator doesn't seem too hard. 
Thanks, tim 
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