FullText Index - Searching values from another table - tsql

Is it possible, in SQL Server 2008, using the full text index syntax, to run a query such as this one?
SELECT *
FROM TABLE_TO_SEARCH S,
TABLE_WITH_STRINGS_TO_SEARCH SS
WHERE
CONTAINS(S.WHOLE_NAME,SS.FIRST_NAME)
OR CONTAINS(S.WHOLE_NAME,SS.LAST_NAME)
I need to search for the FIRST_NAME in table TABLE_TO_SEARCH, column WHOLE_NAME that has an full text index on it. It doesn't seem to be a valid query though... Is there any workaround to it by using the full text index search?
LATER EDIT:
Here is the business case: each night I am downloading from several websites information about "blacklisted" individuals and insert it into a table in this format: WholeName, LastName, FirstName, MiddleName. But the data is chaotic as WholeName does not necessarily contain either the last, first or middle name or the WholeName is null while the other 3 fields have values, or every of these 4 fields is null and so on. Also, the data may repeat itself as one blacklisted individual may come from 2+ of these websites. What I need to do is to compare this data, as chaotic as it is, against our customer data based on our customer's First and Last name and give it a matching score (rank) against the files we download from these websites.
First I tried with charindex or like operators but I couldn't create a scoring algorithm based on this and also it took 6 hours to compare just our customer's first and last name with only the WholeName column from the TABLE_TO_SEARCH table. I thought that perhaps implementing the full_text index it would get easier and faster but ... apparently I was wrong.
Has anyone dealt with a task like this? And if so, what was the best approach?

After skimming http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms187787.aspx and http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms142571.aspx I don't think it is possible to do your search in this way. Not only that, but it seems this type of index wouldn't work well with names anyway.
If you care about checking one name then all you have to do is set those values to variables. This method would allow you to use the full-text index.
Otherwise, I would suggest splitting the WHOLE_NAME column (if there is a space or unique character between the first and last name) and comparing each part to those other columns. If you are working with a huge data set, you may want to experiment with doing this at a temp table level and creating an index.
Good luck!

Related

Automating a data feed into a PostgreSQL table when the number of columns could change and there are duplicate names

My company uses a third-party vendor to get all of our NPS information. I'm trying to set up a data feed from this vendor into our data warehouse, which runs PostgreSQL.
The feed is in the form of 2 tab-separated text files: "question mapping" and the responses. The question map is one row per question, with columns for question id, question text, question label question type, etc - straightforward. The responses are one row per survey response, with a column for each question and stuff like user id, etc. Here are the 2 biggest problems:
The survey questions sometimes use the same question ID for different questions, resulting in multiple columns in the response data having the same name but not being the same question.
The number of questions could change, resulting in a different number of columns in the data.
Both of these things make it a real headache to automate a data feed into a single table.
I'm afraid I don't quite know how to phrase my real question other than, "Does anyone have any ideas how I can accomplish this?" If I think of something better than that, I'll come and update this, so for now:
Does anyone have any ideas at all about how I can efficiently set up my automated data feed without having to always drop and recreate everything?
If your data is a mess and doesn't really have well defined columns you can use the entity attribute value pattern, where you turn each fact into a set of rows with 4 columns - a unique row id, the same entity id for each row extracted from the map, an attribute column (where you put what would be the name of the column) you get from the key of the map, and a value column where you put the value from the map. It's not that neat but you can still query it and you won't have to drop it when you receive a map with a new column.

Openedge SDO -> smart data browser - I want to filter the query results

I have an SDO supplying data to a read-only browser. The SDO query joins several tables and has calculated fields as well as natural data fields.
The users now want a search facility so the browser will only show rows where the search word appears in ANY of the text fields.
For example they want to see rows where
customer.name matches "*bob*" OR
customer.address1 matches "*bob*" OR
product.description matches "*bob*" OR
calc_field_1 matches "*bob*" OR
calc_field_2 matches "*bob*" OR ...
Ideally the answer will filter the SDO output as it is created - but I am also happy to filter the data on the way to the smartbrowser or in the smartbrowser.
The business problem you're trying to solve in fraught with performance issues if you implement it as written. I'd suggest
adding another character column to the table or db,
putting all the words from the other columns in it,
applying a word-index to the new column,
doing a search on that column, and then linking back to the source tables.
It'll be much faster and easier to use.
I used a very simple solution in the end. Users can enter a string they are looking for. If the string is in a cell in the browser then the cell is highlighted in yellow.
Before this the users had to scroll up and down trying to spot the cells of interest in hundreds of rows. We did not have the time or budget for anything fancier.
The important bit of code in the smartbrowser is like this...
on row-display of br_table in frame f-main
do:
if rowObject.field1 matches "*BOB*" then
rowObject.field1:BGCOLOR in browse br_table = 14.
if rowObject.field2 matches "*BOB*" then
rowObject.field2:BGCOLOR in browse br_table = 14.
if rowObject.field3 matches "*BOB*" then
rowObject.field3:BGCOLOR in browse br_table = 14.
... etc ...
it's not hard-coded to only look for Bob - but you should get the idea.

haystack/elasticsearch: trying to find "s04e07"

i have a kinda weird problem with haystack/elasticsearch trying to find tv episodes stored in my database based on a string like this: 's04e07' which means season 4 episode 7 and is a kind of standard format, but the search index has its problems with that.
Trying a few different things it looks like numbers are not indexed in EdgeNgramFields.
In a CharField i can only find exact word matches like '2013' if contained in the titel, but i have no luck finding 's04e07'.
How do i get my results out of the index?
How could i possibly change the hardcoded default mapping in haystack to index my stuff correctly?
I actually wrote about haystack a few days ago, I would suggest reading that one first:
Django Haystack Distinct Value for Field
It's not directly on point, but my advice here is the same. Stop using haystack.
Haystack comes with an outofthebox edgengram and ngram analyzers, which is cool, except these analyzers don't work in nearly all use cases.
They will especially not work in yours because you are mixing numbers and chars.
But my first question is, why can't you index the data like this:
"season":1
"episode":1
And then at search time break down the users search into the above format?
If that isn't possible, you can still PUT a mapping manually without letting haystack do it for you (which I recommend highly anyway because it's mappings are not correct). It's pretty easy to do with elasticutils.
Keep in mind, I don't think edgengram is exactly what you want here in any event. because it only grams from the edge and is most useful for autocompletes, for example if someone is typing s04e and you want to display a list of possible matches.
So, this depends on how users will query the data. Will it always be the above string whole, or parts of the string, or will they sometimes search for e07 and you want to show all seasons with episode 7's?
The last possibility here is to just index it as normal (haystack will choose snowball) and use prefix queries / regex queries to get what you want.

iPhone Dev - Trying to access every row of a sqlite3 table sequentially

this is my first time using SQL at all, so this might sound basic. I'm making an iPhone app that creates and uses a sqlite3 database (I'm using the libsqlite3.dylib database as well as importing "sqlite3.h"). I've been able to correctly created the database and a table in it, but now I need to know the best way to get stuff back from it.
How would I go about retrieving all the information in the table? It's very important that I be able to access each row in the order that it is in the table. What I want to do (if this helps) is get all the info from the various fields in a single row, put all that into one object, and then store the object in an array, and then do the same for the next row, and the next, etc. At the end, I should have an array with the same number of elements as I have rows in my sql table. Thank you.
My SQL is rusty, but I think you can use SELECT * FROM myTable and then iterate through the results. You can also use a LIMIT/OFFSET(1) structure if you do not want to retrieve all elements at one from your table (for example due to memory concerns).
(1) Note that this can perform unexpectedly bad, depending on your use case. Look here for more info...
How would I go about retrieving all the information in the table? It's
very important that I be able to access each row in the order that it
is in the table.
That is not how SQL works. Rows are not kept in the table in a specific order as far as SQL is concerned. The order of rows returned by a query is determined by the ORDER BY clause in the query, e.g. ORDER BY DateCreated, or ORDER BY Price.
But SQLite has a rowid virtual column that can be used for this purpose. It reflects the sequence in which the rows were inserted. Except that it might change with a VACUUM. If you make it an INTEGER PRIMARY KEY it should stay constant.
order by rowid

Postgres full text search across multiple related tables

This may be a very simplistic question, so apologies in advance, but I am very new to database usage.
I'd like to have Postgres run its full text search across multiple joined tables. Imagine something like a model User, with related models UserProfile and UserInfo. The search would only be for Users, but would include information from UserProfile and UserInfo.
I'm planning on using a gin index for the search. I'm unclear, however, on whether I'm going to need a separate tsvector column in the User table to hold the aggregated tsvectors from across the tables, and to setup triggers to keep it up to date. Or if it's possible to create an index without a tsvector column that'll keep itself up to date whenever any of the relevant fields in any of the relevant tables change. Also, any tips on the syntax of the command to create all this would be much appreciated as well.
Your best answer is probably to have a separate tsvector column in each table (with an index on, of course). If you aggregate the data up to a shared tsvector, that'll create a lot of updates on that shared one whenever the individual ones update.
You will need one index per table. Then when you query it, obviously you need multiple WHERE clauses, one for each field. PostgreSQL will then automatically figure out which combination of indexes to use to give you the quickest results - likely using bitmap scanning. It will make your queries a little more complex to write (since you need multiple column matching clauses), but that keeps the flexibility to only query some of the fields in the cases where you want.
You cannot create one index that tracks multiple tables. To do that you need the separate tsvector column and triggers on each table to update it.