CompuServe Messages

#Public domain text?

    21-Mar-93 13:18:18
Sb: #Public domain text?
Fm: Jerry Isdale 72330,770
To: Albert Dayes 70007,3615
Albert, There are fundimental differences between conventional database requirements and full text data/indexing systems. First is the obvious part, conventional db's have (sometimes) limited fields with ranges of values. Full text just isnt as well chunked. Then there is the indexing problems and index/data size. A full text index needs a number of more things per item like the location of instance. (Actually, this depends highly on the type of index you want. Some systems only need keep a count of the # of occurances of the item in the chunk.) Data Size is one of the big failings of most low cost db's. They work quite well when you have say 1-32,768 records, but when you want to go to a cdrom and have millions of records, they just cant handle it. Another problem is the Relational DB concept of breaking records down into normalized tables. This is really hard on CDROM users 'cause each of those tables is put in a different place on the disk. When you want to put the data back together, you got to scan all over the place to assemble the data. Jerry (who as a freelance programmer would love to take on some of those interface & database jobs people mentioned in this thread <g>)