----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2001 3:19
PM
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
midrange.com
