It has been suggested in the past that the cataloging machinery in Zope should be able to index the results of SQL methods. This would be one way to approach the problem, although it is not ideal because the information in the RDMBS may change independently of the ZCatalog which indexes it. It would be ideal if someone were to think about this problem really hard, and perhaps come up with some ideas of how the problem could be solved. This probably belongs in a Wiki somewhere. RDBMS systems are not particularly good at full-text searching to begin with (I'm not quite sure how SQL Server handles this, Oracle requires something like Intermedia, an add-on package). Zope does a pretty darn good job at full-text searching attributes and method results of objects in the ZODB. It's transparent to the application as well. Most RDMBS system full-text search facilities require... thought. ZCatalog really doesn't most of the time, it just works. It would be nice to have this kind of transparency for full-text searching of RDBMS systems as well.

...

My reason for asking this is that I`m trying to sell OpenSource to my co-workers, show that Open can be just as good as any commercial, Closed-Sourced alternative. When I said that full-text searching wasn`t running out-of-the-box I was laughed at. The solution used in my company is Windows 2000 server, MS SQL 7.0 and SiteServer/MS IIS. To compete with this full-text searching is a must. I used PostgreSQL 7.0.2 with Zope and PostgreSQL has a c-library for full-text searching included in the source. If we could get this to work with Zope we would be a bit closer.

I`m going to dive into this, so if somebody wants to help, has tips or whatever, please feel free to email me.

Oleg. (All opinions are mine and not of my employer) ---- Oleg Broytmann Foundation for Effective Policies phd@phd.russ.ru Programmers don't die, they just GOSUB without RETURN.

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