Search selected tabels in database and line up results? - tsql

I'm trying to build a sarch page on my case management system, but I'm struggling to get something dynamic in place.
I would like to search multiple tables for a given string.
And return a list of cases these refer to.
Ie I have 3 tables (the project include several more, but to explain I just use 3).
1: Case main table, including caseID, title, and description.
2: notes table, including a ntext note field.
This is 1:* from the case table so each case can have multiple notes
3: adress table, including street and city for the case
This is also 1:* from the case table so each case can have multiple addresses
I would like to search for ie "Sunset Boulevard", and if the string is found in either the case title, the note or the address I would like to return the list of cases that match.
I can do a normal SELECT statement at get the caseID and Title and in the WHERE Clause specify which to include, ie:
SELECT CaseID, Title
FROM Cases
WHERE Cases.caseID IN ( SELECT CaseID FROM notes WHERE Notes.note like '%Sunset boulevard%' )
OR Cases.caseID IN ( SELECT CaseID FROM address WHERE address.address1 like '%Sunset boulevard%' )
And then expand the where clause to all columns I want to search.
But that won't give me any hint on where the searched string has been found.
I also found another article here https://stackoverflow.com/a/709137
and could use this to search entire database for fields, but this will still not give me a list of cases.
Anyone got a "best practice" for creating small search engine on website?

Best practice will be to move so massive search functionality outside OLTP area and use search engine: eg. Solr, Sphinx, Elasticsearch etc.

Related

How can I match up user inputs to ambiguous city names?

We have a set of tables shown below we use for our other tables to reference for location data. Some examples are:
Find all companies within X miles of X City
Create a company profile's location as X City
We solve the problem of multiple cities with similar names by matching with State as well, but now we ran into a different set of problems. We use Google's Place Autocomplete for both Geocoding and matching up a users query with our Cities. This works fairly well until Google's format deviates from ours.
Example:
St. Louis !== Saint Louis and
Ameca del Torro !== Ameca Torro
Is there a way to fuzzy match cities in our queries?
Our query to match cities now looks like:
SELECT c.id
FROM city c
INNER JOIN state s
ON s.id = c.state_id
WHERE c.name = 'Los Angeles' AND s.short_name = 'CA'
I've also considered the denormalizing city and simply storing coordinates to still accomplish the radius search. We have around 2 million rows in our company table now so a radius search would be performed on that rather than by city table with a JOIN on company. This would also mean we wouldn't be able to create custom regions (simply anyway) for cities, and add other attributes to cities in the future.
I found this answer but it is basically affirming our way of normalizing input is a good method, but not how we match to our local Table (unless Google offers a City Name export I don't know about).
The short answer is that you can use Postgres's full text search functionality, with a customized search configuration.
Since your dealing with place names, your probably want to avoid stemming, so you can use the simple configuration as a starting point. You can also add stop-words that make sense for place names (with the examples above, you can probably consider "St.", "Saint", and "del" as stop-words).
A pretty basic outline of setting up your customized is below:
Create a stopwords file and put it in your $SHAREDIR/tsearch_data Postgres directory. See https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/textsearch-dictionaries.html#TEXTSEARCH-STOPWORDS.
Create a dictionary that uses this stopwords list (you can probably use the pg_catalog.simple as your template dictionary). See https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/textsearch-dictionaries.html#TEXTSEARCH-SIMPLE-DICTIONARY.
Create a search configuration for place names. See https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/textsearch-configuration.html.
Alter your search configuration to use the dictionary you created in Step 2 (cf. the link above).
Another consideration is how to consider internationalization. It seems that the issue for your second example (Ameca del Torro vs. Ameca Torro) might be a Spanish vs. English representation of the name. If that's the case, you could also consider storing both a "localized" and "universal" (e.g. English) version of the city name.
At the end, your query (using full-text search) might look like this (where the 'places' is the name of your search configuration):
SELECT cities."id"
FROM cities
INNER JOIN "state" ON "state".id = cities.state_id
WHERE
"state".short_name = 'CA'
AND TO_TSVECTOR('places', cities.name) ## TO_TSQUERY('places', 'Los & Angeles')

Prioritise which identifier to use

My crystal report pulls data about books, including an identifier (isbn, issn order number etc.), author, and publisher.
The ID field stores multiple ways to identify the book. The report displays any of the identifiers for that record. If one book has two identifiers; issn and order number, the report currently displays one apparently at random.
How can I make it prioritise which type to use based on a preset order? I figured some sort of filter on the field could work, but I haven't figured out how. I can't edit the table, but I can use SQL within the report.
If all the different types of ID are stored in a single field, your best bet is to use a SQL Command inside your report to separate them into multiple virtual fields.
Go to Database Fields / Database Expert, expand the connection you want to use, and pick Add Command. From here you can write a custom SQL statement to grab the information you're currently using, and at the same time separate the ID field into multiple different fields (as far as the report will be concerned, anyway. The table will stay unchanged.)
The trick is to figure out how to write your command to do the separation. We don't know what your data looks like, so you're on your own from here.
Based on the very little information that you have provided and if i was to make a guess.I suggest you make use of the formula field in your report and then use something like this to accomplish your goal.
IF ISNULL{first_priority_field_name} OR {first_priority_field_name} = '' THEN
{second_priority_field_name}
ELSE
{first_priority_field_name}
Use nested IF statement in case there are more than 2 identifier fields.

How to get best matching products by number of matches in postgres

Postgres 9.1 shopping cart contains product table
create table products (
id char(30) primary key,
name char(50),
description text );
Cart has search field. If something is entered into it, autocomplete dropdown must show best matching products ordered by number products matched to this criteria.
How to implement such query in postgres 9.1 ? Search should performed by name and description fields in products table.
It is sufficient to use substring match. Full text search with sophisticated text match is not strictly required.
Update
Word joote can be part of product name or description.
For example for first match in image text may contain
.. See on jootetina ..
and for other product
Kasutatakse jootetina tegemiseks ..
and another with upper case
Jootetina on see ..
In this case query should return word jootetina and matching count 3.
How to make it working like auotcomplete which happens when search term is typed in Google Chrome address bar ?
How to implement this ?
Or if this is difficult, how to return word jootetina form all those texts which matches search term joote ?
select word, count(distinct id) as total
from (
select id,
regexp_split_to_table(name || ' ' || description, E'\\s+') as word
from products
) s
where position(lower('joote') in lower(word)) > 0
group by word
order by 2 desc, 1
First of all, do not use the data type char(n). That's a misunderstanding, you want varchar(n) or just text. I suggest text.
Any downsides of using data type "text" for storing strings?
With that fixed, you need a smart index-based approach or this is a performance nightmare. Either trigram GIN indexes on the original columns or a text_pattern_ops btree index on a materialized view of individual words (with count).
Pattern matching with LIKE, SIMILAR TO or regular expressions in PostgreSQL
The MV approach is probably superior for many repetitions among words.

Must be possible to filter table names in a single database?

As far as I can tell, the search filter in the navigator will only search available database names, not table names.
If you click on a table name and start typing, it appears that a simple search can be performed beginning with the first letter of the tables.
I'm looking for way to be able to search all table names in a selected database. Sometimes there can be a lot of tables to sort through. It seems like a feature that would likely be there and I can't find it.
Found out the answer...
If you type for example *.test_table or the schema name instead of the asterisk it will filter them. The key is that the schema/database must be specified in the search query. The asterisk notation works with the table names as well. For example *.*test* will filter any table in any schema with test anywhere in the table name.
You can use the command
SHOW TABLES like '%%';
To have it always in your tools, you can add it as a snippet to SQL aditions panel on the right.
Then you can always either bring it in your editor and type your search key between %%, or just execute it as it is (It will fetch all the tables of the database) and then just filter using the "filter rows" input of the result set.

Reporting Services and Dynamic Fields

I'm new to reporting services so this question might be insane. I am looking for a way to create an empty 'template' report (that is basically a form letter) rather than having to create one for every client in our system. Part of this form letter is a section that has any number of 25 specific fields. The section is arranged as such:
Name: Jesse James
Date of Birth: 1/1/1800
Address: 123 Blah Blah Street
Anywhere, USA 12345
Another Field: Data
Another Field2: More Data
Those (and any of the other fields the client specifies) could be arranged in any order and the label on the left could be whatever the client decides (example: 'DOB' instead of 'Date of Birth'). IDEALLY, I'd like to be able to have a web interface where you can click on the fields you want, specify the order in which they'll appear, and specify what the custom label is. I figured out a way to specify the labels and order them (and load them 'dynamically' in the report) but I wanted to take it one step further if I could and allow dynamic field (right side) selection and ordering. The catch is, I want to do this without using dynamic SQL. I went down the path of having a configuration table that contained an ordinal, custom label text, and the actual column name and attempting to join that table with the table that actually contains the data via information_schema.columns. Maybe querying ALL of the potential fields and having an INNER JOIN do my filtering (if there's a match from the 'configuration' table, etc). That doesn't work like I thought it would :) I guess I was thinking I could simulate the functionality of a dataset (it having the value and field name baked in to the object). I realize that this isn't the optimal tool to be attempting such a feat, it's just what I'm forced to work with.
The configuration table would hold the configuration for many customers/reports and I would be filtering by a customer ID. The config table would look somthing like this:
CustID LabelText ColumnName Ordinal
1 First Name FName 1
1 Last Name LName 2
1 Date of Birth DOBirth 3
2 Client ID ClientID 1
2 Last Name LName 2
2 Address 1 Address1 3
2 Address 2 Address2 4
All that to say:
Is there a way to pull off the above mentioned query?
Am I being too picky about not using dynamic SQL as the section in question will only be pulling back one row? However, there are hundreds of clients running this report (letter) two or three times a day.
Also, keep in mind I am not trying to dynamically create text boxes on the report. I will either just concatenate the fields into a single string and dump that into a text box or I'll have multiple reports each with a set number of text boxes expecting a generic field name ("field1",etc). The more I type, the crazier this sounds...
If there isn't a way to do this I'll likely finagle something in custom code; but my OCD side wants to believe there is SQL beyond my current powers that can do this in a slicker way.
Not sure why you need this all returned in one row: it seems like SSRS would want this normalized further: return a row for every row in the configuration table for the current report. If you really need to concatenate then do that in Embedded code in the report, or consider just putting a table in the form letter. The query below makes some assumptions about your configuration table. Does it only hold the cofiguration for the current report, or does it hold the config for many customers/reports at once? Also you didn't give much info about how you'll filter to the appropriate record, so I just used a customer ID.
SELECT
config.ordinal,
config.LabelText,
CASE config.ColumnName
WHEN 'FName' THEN DataRecord.FirstName
WHEN 'LName' THEN DataRecord.LastName
WHEN 'ClientID' THEN DataRecord.ClientID
WHEN 'DOBirth' THEN DataRecord.DOB
WHEN 'Address' THEN DataRecord.Address
WHEN 'Field' THEN DataRecord.Field
WHEN 'Field2' THEN DataRecord.Field2
ELSE
NULL
END AS response
FROM
ConfigurationTable AS config
LEFT OUTER JOIN
DataTable AS DataRecord
ON config.CustID = DataRecord.CustomerID
WHERE DataRecord.CustomerID = #CustID
ORDER BY
config.Ordinal
There are other ways to do this, in SSRS or in SQL, depends on more details of your requirements.