Best algorithm for searching a substring

I'm trying to develop a program which uses a rather large database. There is an alphanumerical field in which I must as fast as possible find any row containing a given substring, and then sort the result in alphabetical order.
It is now 3 days I read documents on the subject, but it's all theory and I can't make my choice beetween balanced trees, tries, PAT trees, suffix trees, hashing, and consors.
And in the real world, I can see many examples of applications doing great with this task, like Access 97, or even the search facilities offered by windows helpfiles.
So here is my question: can somebody please tell me which is the underlying structure, as well as the search and sorting methods, used by Access 97 ?

Thanks for pointing me the right direction. Received on Fri Nov 02 2001 - 06:26:43 CET