Re: Character translation in index?

In article <312352BA.41C67EA6_at_sugarland.unocal.com> Robert Born <ststrmb_at_sugarland.unocal.com> writes:

> Experiment with the SOUNDEX SQL function to see how well it works for
> your problem.

Thanks, but this does not solve my problem -- soundex can return far too many matches. Besides, like I said -- for the sake of speed, I don't want each lookup to search the entire column; I want an index to be utilized. Or am I wrong -- can

	select name ...
        where some_translation(name) = some_translation('SMYTHE')

> I had to resort to creating a "soundex last name"
> column in a person table and indexing it for searches on English
> spellings of Arabic names. It worked quite well, even finding all 7
> English spellings of Muhammed.

Nice idea for an extra utility function, though.

Hmm - similar to your example, we could create a "character translated name" column which is searched instead of the "name" column. But if so, we had better to do that to *every* column the users can search in, in order to give the users a uniform interface.

-- 
Regards,

Hallvard