Support for Full Text Indexes and search

Question

The search functionality in dbFront uses LIKE which can causes table scans. This performs very poorly on large tables. It would be great if dbFront could support the Full-Text indexes available in all of the database servers (SQL Server, Oracle and MySQL).

This would be relevant for both the Advanced and the Quick/Simple searchs.

Answer 1

As of version 1.1.3, dbFront transparently supports Full-Text search for MySQL, Oracle and SQL Server. Full-Text search is classified as Enterprise functionality.

dbFront will automatically detect the Full-Text indexes and adjust queries to take advantage of any Full-Text indexes it knows about. This happens automatically in both Simple Search and in the Advanced Search.

Knowledgable users can construct advanced full-text search queries to take advantage of their specific database server. dbFront automatically detects advanced queries and processes them accordingly.

dbFront allows users to add a search prefix to force how the search is sent to the database. A search can be prefixed with "L:" to force the search to be treated as a simple LIKE query. Other prefixes are database specific.

MySql Full-Text Search can be run in three different modes:

• Boolean (B:), Natural Language (N:) and Query Expansion (E:).

Oracle Text Search has a single flexible mode:

• Contains (C:).

SQL Server Full-Text Search can be run in two different modes:

• Contains (C:) and FreeText (F:).

For more details see: Full-Text Search