Design of a CV database

Hi All,

I have been asked to build a database for storing CVs that come into the recruitment team. First question is what datatype to use to store the CV? Long Raw, Blob or BFile?

A list of skills (and other info) will be stored against the CV so that searches can be done on the candidates' key skills. However, the users would also like to do free text searches through the actual text of the CVs. This cannot be done on the actual file because it will probably be in MS Word or other format. I was thinking about getting the user to save the CV as a text file. Then to read it in and store it in a LONG column. However, I've don't think that you can't use INSTR on a LONG column, so I would not be able to search for keywords.

I then thought about chopping this text file into chucks and storing it in VARCHAR2 fields. However, this would make the serve routing messy.

My final idea is to remove common works like the, this, that, address etc. from the text file and only storing the first 4000 characters in a VARCHAR2 field. Disregarding the rest. After all, 4000 characters should be enough to store most, if not all, of most peoples CVs.

What do you think? Am I right to store each CV both as the original file, and as text, or am I barking up the wrong tree?

I am also concerned that searching will be too slow with approx 10000 CVs in the database. Does anybody have any experience searching through this amount of text?

Thanks for any help,

Ken.

PS Somebody has just mentioned Intermedia and IFS to me. But I don't know what these are yet. Time to do a bit more reading. Received on Tue Dec 19 2000 - 07:30:19 CST