--- Jim Self <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Kevin, I think you greatly underestimate the difficulty of providing
> a general search
> functionality that is easy to use and fast enough to be useful on
> large and complex "live"
> data bases. Then again, it is said that an advantage of youth is in
> not knowing that a
> thing is impossible until after you have done it. ;)
>
> The difficulty is in satisfying all three objectives at the same time
> (or up to seven
> depending on how you count [general, easy, fast, useful, large,
> complex, live]).
I don't know that prospects for building a general search feature are
THAT bleak, but it's certainly a non-trivial problem (consider how much
has been written on query optimization). I also agree that a brute
force solution is not good enough.
> Brute
> force searches can be painfully slow, so I think that the general
> philosophy is (has been)
> that routine queries should always be based on cross references for
> ease of use,
> efficiency, and speed.
Even writing a query mechanism that could make use of existing
cross-references would be a big improvement. But there is more that
could be done: rewriting queries, lazy building of cross-reference data
for frequently used fields, caching of intermediate values, etc. But
this won't work if people use direct global sets to update the files
because updates need to be able to invalidate the cache.
===
Gregory Woodhouse <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
"It is foolish to answer a question that
you do not understand."
--G. Polya ("How to Solve It")
-------------------------------------------------------
Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security?
Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier
Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo
http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642
_______________________________________________
Hardhats-members mailing list
Hardhats-members@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members
