Re: Case Insensitve Text Searching

> In article <5li5ga$2sj_at_client2.news.psi.net>, Brad Pliner
> <brad_at_iliad.com> writes
> >
> >What's the best way to do case insensitive text searching?
> >
> >Here's what I'm considering:
> >Suppose I'm searching the names of movies. I'm create a field for the name,
> >as it will be displayed to the user "The Long Kiss Goodnight". Additionally
> >I'll create a field for the name, all capitalized, and strip out all
> >instances of "the", "of", etc. ("LONG KISS GOODNIGHT"). I'll use that field
> >to search by.
> >
> >Any thoughts? Is this the best way to do this?
> >
> > - Brad
> >
> >_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
> >_
> > Bradley S. Pliner mailto:brad_at_pliner.com Internet Software
> > Pliner Products http://www.pliner.com/ Custom Development
> >- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> >-

This discussion is covered in the book 'Oracle Design' from O'Reilly ( sorry to the authors but I can't recall your names ). In it they cover how to check on say the first couple of characters with equality checks and then use a pattern to determine the remainder of the search. Although I am only about a quarter of the way thought this book and have found it very useful. This approach alone has increased the speed of text searches. The one thing they point out that messes it up is if the data is not nicely distributed, i.e. too many THE at the start. To get around that problem just store the title as "Long Kiss Goodnight, The" and let any output worry about moving the THE back to the front ( or use two fields, one with the pre info and one for searching ).

Anyhow, I don't have the book here with me but I would recommend it to not only help solve this type of problem but to also for providing thought provoking ideas at solving other Oracle problems aswell.

Dave Boswell Received on Fri May 23 1997 - 00:00:00 CDT