Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 11:53:45 -0500 From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> To: pgsql-hackers@postgreSQL.org, database@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: [HACKERS] Re: Mysql 321 - Mysql 322 - msql Message-ID: <1747.912185625@sss.pgh.pa.us> In-Reply-To: Your message of Fri, 27 Nov 1998 09:37:51 -0400 (AST) <Pine.BSF.4.05.9811270936440.21447-100000@thelab.hub.org>
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The Hermit Hacker <scrappy@hub.org> writes: > On 27 Nov 1998, Tom Ivar Helbekkmo wrote: >> See http://glimpse.cs.arizona.edu/ for a powerful inverted indexing >> engine and various related software. > Just curious, but other then specialized applications like > Glimpse, does anyone actually support/do this? I dearly love Glimpse. (Sample things I use it for: rooting through nearly 10 years worth of archived email; finding all references to a particular name in the Postgres sources, almost instantly; ditto for the even larger Ptolemy sources; looking for files that I can't remember where I put ... it's great. And aren't the Postgres mailing list archive indexes Glimpse-driven?) I don't currently have any databases that could benefit from full-text indexes. But I can think of applications where it'd be important, particularly after we get rid of the limit on tuple sizes so that it becomes reasonable to put fair-size chunks of text into database entries. For example: would it be useful to put my email archive into a Postgres database, one message per tuple? Maybe ... but if I can't glimpse it afterwards, forgetaboutit. You could probably glue something like this together from existing spare parts, say by running a nightly cron job that dumps out the text fields of your database for indexing by Glimpse. But it wouldn't be integrated into SQL --- you'd have to query the index separately outside of SQL, then use the results to drive a query to fetch the selected records. A seamless integration would make Glimpse indexes be a new type of index associated with a new match operator, something like create index index1 on table using glimpse (text_field); select * from table where glimpse(text_field, 'pattern'); I have no idea how hard that would be... regards, tom lane To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-database" in the body of the message
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