pcplantdb

[John Schinnerer <eco_living@yahoo.com>]

Aloha,

> * search should be by category,  with the facility to search text
>      within the database categories for specific information.
>
>I know this is not what relational databases do at this point.  

SQL DBs can do full-text indexing (and thus full-text searching).
Here is some info on MySQL's full-text capabilities:

http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/Fulltext_Search.html

For those seeking an alternative, Zope's ZCatalog object database
provides completely integrated full-text search capabilites (including
the basic boolean and grouping operations) that can be submitted
directly to a ZCatalog via web request (e.g. an HTML form; no messy
intermediate SQL statement creation... :-).  An example, a very simple
image gallery (e.g. image DB) can be seen here (the full-text search is
on the captions for the images):

http://www.sfkingsriver.org/gallery/

  An even faster and more powerful pluggable index product, TextIndexNG
1.05, is available to replace the 'stock' ZCatalog index facility:

http://www.zope.org/Members/ajung/TextIndexNG

Zope can also query SQL DBs directly (and then do whatever one wants
with the results), but since they're not Zope object DBs the search
results, including full-text, are limited by the SQL implementation's
capabilities.


=====
John Schinnerer, MA
-------------------------
- Eco-Living -
Cultural & Ecological Designing
People - Place - Learning - Integration
john@eco-living.net
http://eco-living.net

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