Re: Is Oracle better then MySQL for string searches?

> Having said that, Oracle 8i and better comes with the "intermedia"
> package which has a lot of support for searching out strings etc. I
> think, but am not sure, that it does its own indexing and would
> possibly provide a way of speeding up your queries.

Since version 7 afaik - then it was called ConText Option. And yes, it does create special index for this. In fact, it is comprised of several DR$ tables (usually 4 or more, depending on index creation options) and conventional indexes on them. When new row is inserted, or a row is updated, the indexed data is tokenized and all these tokens and related data go into these special tables. When you issue the query like the following:

SELECT doc_id FROM docs
 WHERE CONTAINS(doc_body,'my search term') > 0

these special DR$ tables are scanned instead. The option can satisfy very complex queries pretty quick and it is constantly improved. I am not sure if this option is available with Standard Edition though.

-- 
Vladimir Zakharychev (bob@dpsp-yes.com)                http://www.dpsp-yes.com
Dynamic PSP(tm) - the first true RAD toolkit for Oracle-based internet applications.
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