Re: Design of a CV database

Hi

Intermedia is IMO a better option for you than IFS.

Intermedia is the text search engine that comes with 8i. For your purposes it will allow you to store the CV's on your file system and do free text searches against them. You just store the URL for the file in the db. You can also store in a blob if you so desire. We have used both of thse techniques successfully.

I cannot for the life of me see why anyone would use IFS as opposed to existing tried and tested file systems. Seems like a badly conceived product to me, presumably aimed at kicking Bill G in the face by restricting sales of NT.

--
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
Audit Commission UK
"Ken Harvey" <Ken.Harvey_at_iconmedialab.co.uk> wrote in message
news:91nnja$4og$1_at_reader-00.news.insnet.cw.net...


> 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.

>

>

>

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>

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