Database Search Engine

Hi folks,
Whts up......? M back, after a long gap.
I have come across with a major issue. And u know wht th issue is.......?
It is about th DATABASE SEARCH TOOL. I have a database of around 30 tables. Now I wud like to have aa search engine on my .asp page. There will be a text box on th page and one submit button. After typing some text in th text area n submitting th page, my package sud check tht perticular text in all th COLUMNS of all th TABLES, n whrevr it gets a match (exactly same, or by speech recognition), it sud through th links on th next page.

Nw i wud like u guys to take this problem, at th earliest n come up with a up to th mark solution.

ThnkxYou will probably want to use SQL Server's full-text search capability.

But...

...you are going to allow web page viewers to issue non-sargable searches of every value of every column in every table in your database? That sounds insane to me. What kind of performance to you expect?|||Aside from the issues the blind dude mentions, I'm sure we've all "played' with this...

You need dynamic sql and a select against the information schema columns view...

EDIT: AND a cursor, AND a temp or table variable to hold the results...

what do you plan to do about dates and numbers?|||Oh come on! I understand the requirement is somewhat fishy, but this is not a homework where just the solution is needed! If you REALLY need to search for a pattern (even if it's exact) in every field of every table, - why would one want to use dynamic SQL or a cursor or a combination there of? Unless your intention is to kill the server with the second connection while the first one is still doing this insanity?

You'll need to write a function for all tables that will transpose all the char-based columns into one column with UNION ALL and a CAST to accomodate for the widest field and a WHERE clause for each participant of the UNION with the pattern that you're looking for. The second column should be a table identifier and possibly the third should be the PK from the table (I hope, contrary to "some" opinions that you're using INT/BIGINT for your PKs). Then you fire this function from the stored procedure that further manipulates the results. At THAT point, and at that point only, you may have to use dynamic SQL, and possibly a cursor, if the retrieval of the "links" will involve selection from the tables that appeared from the execution of the function mentioned above.

EDITED: And while writing the participants of the UNION, make sure to use either READ UNCOMMITTED isolation level, or NOLOCK table hint, UNLESS (!!!) DML operations that may be performed on the affected tables is important.|||I'm speechless....|||Well, that's ANOTHER way to skin the cat...

...but it's still going to scream bloody murder while you're peeling off the fur.|||Here's a sp I found you can get started with.|||Yup, ANOTHER way would be to implement Full-Text Search and use CONTAINSTABLE while UNIONed ALL 30 times. Either way it's a case of animal abuse ;)|||Yup, ANOTHER way would be to implement Full-Text Search and use CONTAINSTABLE while UNIONed ALL 30 times. Either way it's a case of animal abuse ;)Yeah, but as long as it is just a cat...

-PatP|||Well, that's ANOTHER way to skin the cat...

...but it's still going to scream bloody murder while you're peeling off the fur.

You crack me up.....|||Thnkx folks,
Thnkx for ur help. Though I hv'nt started th work suggested by u people.........as th week passed was tight. Lemme give a try n see what comes.

Thnkx 1nc again|||implement full text indexing on the columns that you wish to search
and use the following functions
contains, freetext, containstable and freetextable.
this is much better than like and dynamic sql because of the "Linguistic based search" ability of the fulltext service
to search long unstructured text in the where clause use freetext
to use the most powerfull and most focused of the 4 choose contains in the where clause (contains will find prefix terms , inflectional, generational and other forms of searches)
to search a table based result set use containstable or freetextable
the diff is that you place these in the from clause of your select.

good luck|||Check this site: http://vyaskn.tripod.com/search_all_columns_in_all_tables.htm