Re: full text indexing

Gene Wirchenko wrote:
> >
> > Full text indexing is more of a document management or string
> > processing kind of problem that a data management problem;
> > it's not really on-topic here.
>
> Off-topic? If I put up an on-line catalog, I would want search
> capability of the catalog text. It strikes me as decidedly odd and
> perverse that the rest of it would be on-topic and this bit would not.

Not every capability that is found in a dbms is part of data management theory. Earlier I gave the example of arithmetic. Definitely in the dbms. Definitely not a data-management-specific topic.

I suppose it depends on how you define database theory. To me, data management is about structuring, typing, querying, manipulating, and constraining data. Which of those does full text search fall under? Querying maybe, I suppose. How is it related to relations, though.

It seems more like a string processing question to me.

Also supporting my claim: no one here has supplied a single reference. You'd think if it *was* on-topic, someone would have said something, since there are plenty of people here who have interesting things to say about database theory.

Marshall Received on Sat Jul 30 2005 - 04:28:57 CEST