I would like to run a search with MSSQL Full text engine where given the following user input:
"Hollywood square"
I want the results to have both Hollywood and square[s] in them.
I can create a method on the web server (C#, ASP.NET) to dynamically produce a sql statement like this:
SELECT TITLE
FROM MOVIES
WHERE CONTAINS(TITLE,'"hollywood*"')
AND CONTAINS(TITLE, '"square*"')
Easy enough. HOWEVER, I would like this in a stored procedure for added speed benefit and security for adding parameters.
Can I have my cake and eat it too?
I agreed with above, look into AND clauses
SELECT TITLE
FROM MOVIES
WHERE CONTAINS(TITLE,'"hollywood*" AND "square*"')
However you shouldn't have to split the input sentences, you can use variable
SELECT TITLE
FROM MOVIES
WHERE CONTAINS(TITLE,#parameter)
by the way
search for the exact term (contains)
search for any term in the phrase (freetext)
The last time I had to do this (with MSSQL Server 2005) I ended up moving the whole search functionality over to Lucene (the Java version, though Lucene.Net now exists I believe). I had high hopes of the full text search but this specific problem annoyed me so much I gave up.
Have you tried using the AND logical operator in your string? I pass in a raw string to my sproc and stuff 'AND' between the words.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms187787.aspx
Related
In Sql Server, I have a table containing 46 million rows.
In "Title" column of table, I want make search. The word may be at any index of field value.
For example:
Value in table: BROTHERS COMPANY
Search string: ROTHER
I want this search to match the given record. This is exactly what LIKE '%ROTHER%' do. However, LIKE '%%' usage should not be used on large tables because of performance issues. How can I achieve it?
Though I don't know your requirements, your best approach may be to challenge them. Middle-of-the-string searches are usually not very practical. If you can get your users to perform prefix searches (broth%) then you can easily use Full Text's wildcard search (CONTAINS(*, '"broth*"')). Full Text can also handle suffix searches (%rothers) with a little extra work.
But when it comes to middle-of-the-string searches with SQL Server, you're stuck using LIKE. However you may be able to improve performance of LIKE by using a binary collation as explained in this article. (I hate to post a link without including its content but it is way too long of an article to post here and I don't understand the approach enough to sum it up.)
If that doesn't help and if middle-of-the-string searches are that important of a requirement then you should consider using a different search solution like Lucene.
Add Full-Text index if you want.
You can search the table using CONTAINS:
SELECT *
FROM YourTable
WHERE CONTAINS(TableColumnName, 'SearchItem')
Given your data stored somewhere in a database:
Hello my name is Tom I like dinosaurs to talk about SQL.
SQL is amazing. I really like SQL.
We want to implement a site search, allowing visitors to enter terms and return relating records. A user might search for:
Dinosaurs
And the SQL:
WHERE articleBody LIKE '%Dinosaurs%'
Copes fine with returning the correct set of records.
How would we cope however, if a user mispells dinosaurs? IE:
Dinosores
(Poor sore dino). How can we search allowing for error in spelling? We can associate common misspellings we see in search with the correct spelling, and then search on the original terms + corrected term, but this is time consuming to maintain.
Any way programatically?
Edit
Appears SOUNDEX could help, but can anyone give me an example using soundex where entering the search term:
Dinosores wrocks
returns records instead of doing:
WHERE articleBody LIKE '%Dinosaurs%' OR articleBody LIKE '%Wrocks%'
which would return squadoosh?
If you're using SQL Server, have a look at SOUNDEX.
For your example:
select SOUNDEX('Dinosaurs'), SOUNDEX('Dinosores')
Returns identical values (D526) .
You can also use DIFFERENCE function (on same link as soundex) that will compare levels of similarity (4 being the most similar, 0 being the least).
SELECT DIFFERENCE('Dinosaurs', 'Dinosores'); --returns 4
Edit:
After hunting around a bit for a multi-text option, it seems that this isn't all that easy. I would refer you to the link on the Fuzzt Logic answer provided by #Neil Knight (+1 to that, for me!).
This stackoverflow article also details possible sources for implentations for Fuzzy Logic in TSQL. Once respondant also outlined Full text Indexing as a potential that you might want to investigate.
Perhaps your RDBMS has a SOUNDEX function? You didn't mention which one was involved here.
SQL Server's SOUNDEX
Just to throw an alternative out there. If SSIS is an option, then you can use Fuzzy Lookup.
SSIS Fuzzy Lookup
I'm not sure if introducing a separate "search engine" is possible, but if you look at products like the Google search appliance or Autonomy, these products can index a SQL database and provide more searching options - for example, handling misspellings as well as synonyms, search results weighting, alternative search recommendations, etc.
Also, SQL Server's full-text search feature can be configured to use a thesaurus, which might help:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms142491.aspx
Here is another SO question from someone setting up a thesaurus to handle common misspellings:
FORMSOF Thesaurus in SQL Server
Short answer, there is nothing built in to most SQL engines that can do dictionary-based correction of "fat fingers". SoundEx does work as a tool to find words that would sound alike and thus correct for phonetic misspellings, but if the user typed in "Dinosars" missing the final U, or truly "fat-fingered" it and entered "Dinosayrs", SoundEx would not return an exact match.
Sounds like you want something on the level of Google Search's "Did you mean __?" feature. I can tell you that is not as simple as it looks. At a 10,000-foot level, the search engine would look at each of those keywords and see if it's in a "dictionary" of known "good" search terms. If it isn't, it uses an algorithm much like a spell-checker suggestion to find the dictionary word that is the closest match (requires the fewest letter substitutions, additions, deletions and transpositions to turn the given word into the dictionary word). This will require some heavy procedural code, either in a stored proc or CLR Db function in your database, or in your business logic layer.
You can also try the SubString(), to eliminate the first 3 or so characters . Below is an example of how that can be achieved
SELECT Fname, Lname
FROM Table1 ,Table2
WHERE substr(Table1.Fname, 1,3) || substr(Table1.Lname,1 ,3) = substr(Table2.Fname, 1,3) || substr(Table2.Lname, 1 , 3))
ORDER BY Table1.Fname;
I have this query:
select name, body
from news
where body like %MyWord%;
I use MySQL database engine. this query will return name, body when found MyWord in body text.
My problem here is that, when I search about two word in body text, like MyWord1 , MyWord2. or more !!!
How I can do that if you know that this query is calling by function (That I can not modify that query all time).
If you need more functionality on your text search patterns, you should use FULL-TEXT-SEARCH in MySQL with the proper indexes.
You will be able to search two or more words at once if that's what you are needing.
You could use some evil SQL-injection (kind of) :)
I assume you pass "MyWord" to the function that contains the query you can't ("can't" or "don't like to"??) change. What happens, if "MyWord" looks something like this:
MyWord1% OR body like %MyWord2
Evil, I know, you have been warned ;)
if you want to find two different words you can do this:
select name, body
from news
where body like %MyWord1% and body like %MyWord2%;
however, that will soon become very non-performant, and there are a number of other options you can look at:
using fulltext search, as suggested
by Pablo Santa Cruz (probably the
simplest to use)
parse your body field into a subtable via a trigger upon insert
search the data by populating a lucene/solr index and searching off of that (a bit more complicated to setup and maintain but the the performance is very impressive.
I am trying to implement a feature similar to the "Related Questions" on Stackoverflow.
How do I go about writing the SQL statement that will search the Title and Summary field of my database for similar questions?
If my questions is: "What is the SQL used to do a search similar to "Related Questions" on Stackoverflow".
Steps that I can think of are;
Strip the quotation marks
Split the sentence into an array of words and run a SQL search on each word.
If I do it this way, I am guessing that I wouldn't get any meaningful results. I am not sure if Full Text Search is enabled on the server, so I am not using that. Will there be an advantage of using Full Text Search?
I found a similar question but there was no answer: similar question
Using SQL 2005
Check out this podcast.
One of our major performance
optimizations for the “related
questions” query is removing the top
10,000 most common English dictionary
words (as determined by Google search)
before submitting the query to the SQL
Server 2008 full text engine. It’s
shocking how little is left of most
posts once you remove the top 10k
English dictionary words. This helps
limit and narrow the returned results,
which makes the query dramatically
faster.
They probably relate based on tags that are added to the questions...
After enabling Full Text search on my SQL 2005 server, I am using the following stored procedure to search for text.
ALTER PROCEDURE [dbo].[GetSimilarIssues]
(
#InputSearch varchar(255)
)
AS
BEGIN
-- SET NOCOUNT ON added to prevent extra result sets from
-- interfering with SELECT statements.
SET NOCOUNT ON;
DECLARE #SearchText varchar(500);
SELECT #SearchText = '"' + #InputSearch + '*"'
SELECT PostId, Summary, [Description],
Created
FROM Issue
WHERE FREETEXT (Summary, #SearchText);
END
I'm pretty sure it would be most efficient to implement the feature based on the tags associated with each post.
It's probably done using a full text search which matches like words/phrases. I've used it in MySQL and SQL Server with decent success with out of the box functionality.
You can find more on MySQL full text searches at:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/fulltext-search.html
Or just google Full Text search and you will find a lot of information.
It looks keyword based on the title you enter, queried against titles and content of other questions. Probably easier (and more appropriate) to do in Lucene (or similar) then in a relational database.
I'd say it's probably a full text search on the question title and the question content and answers as well using the individual words (not the whole title) you enter. Then, using the ranking features of full-text, the top 10 or so questions that rank the highest are displayed.
As tydok pointed out, it looks like they are using full-text searching (I couldn't imagine any other way).
Here's the MSDN reference on Full-Text Searching, nailing the specific query used probably isn't going to happen.
The SQL very well may be just "SELECT * FROM questions;". I find it hard to imagine that the algorithm for finding similar questions is implemented in SQL.
I'm looking for a pattern for performing a dynamic search on multiple tables.
I have no control over the legacy (and poorly designed) database table structure.
Consider a scenario similar to a resume search where a user may want to perform a search against any of the data in the resume and get back a list of resumes that match their search criteria. Any field can be searched at anytime and in combination with one or more other fields.
The actual sql query gets created dynamically depending on which fields are searched. Most solutions I've found involve complicated if blocks, but I can't help but think there must be a more elegant solution since this must be a solved problem by now.
Yeah, so I've started down the path of dynamically building the sql in code. Seems godawful. If I really try to support the requested ability to query any combination of any field in any table this is going to be one MASSIVE set of if statements. shiver
I believe I read that COALESCE only works if your data does not contain NULLs. Is that correct? If so, no go, since I have NULL values all over the place.
As far as I understand (and I'm also someone who has written against a horrible legacy database), there is no such thing as dynamic WHERE clauses. It has NOT been solved.
Personally, I prefer to generate my dynamic searches in code. Makes testing convenient. Note, when you create your sql queries in code, don't concatenate in user input. Use your #variables!
The only alternative is to use the COALESCE operator. Let's say you have the following table:
Users
-----------
Name nvarchar(20)
Nickname nvarchar(10)
and you want to search optionally for name or nickname. The following query will do this:
SELECT Name, Nickname
FROM Users
WHERE
Name = COALESCE(#name, Name) AND
Nickname = COALESCE(#nick, Nickname)
If you don't want to search for something, just pass in a null. For example, passing in "brian" for #name and null for #nick results in the following query being evaluated:
SELECT Name, Nickname
FROM Users
WHERE
Name = 'brian' AND
Nickname = Nickname
The coalesce operator turns the null into an identity evaluation, which is always true and doesn't affect the where clause.
Search and normalization can be at odds with each other. So probably first thing would be to get some kind of "view" that shows all the fields that can be searched as a single row with a single key getting you the resume. then you can throw something like Lucene in front of that to give you a full text index of those rows, the way that works is, you ask it for "x" in this view and it returns to you the key. Its a great solution and come recommended by joel himself on the podcast within the first 2 months IIRC.
What you need is something like SphinxSearch (for MySQL) or Apache Lucene.
As you said in your example lets imagine a Resume that will composed of several fields:
List item
Name,
Adreess,
Education (this could be a table on its own) or
Work experience (this could grow to its own table where each row represents a previous job)
So searching for a word in all those fields with WHERE rapidly becomes a very long query with several JOINS.
Instead you could change your framework of reference and think of the Whole resume as what it is a Single Document and you just want to search said document.
This is where tools like Sphinx Search do. They create a FULL TEXT index of your 'document' and then you can query sphinx and it will give you back where in the Database that record was found.
Really good search results.
Don't worry about this tools not being part of your RDBMS it will save you a lot of headaches to use the appropriate model "Documents" vs the incorrect one "TABLES" for this application.