"woody" <shellymatthys@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1116568453.936941.176620@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> Been reading thru all the posts and KB's on dealing with searching
> across multiple columns. Most examples indicate you know what you're
> looking for in each column.
>
> Here's my big problem:
>
> A: I have 12 tables, each with multiple columns that need to be
> searched.
>
> B: User will enter a search condition in any or all the boxes below
>
> 1 - "All these words"
> 2 - "Exact phrase"
> 3 - "Any of these words"
>
> Unlike the SP3 "fix", if they enter "house cat" in "all these words", I
> want a match if "house" and "cat" are in different tables.
>
> In a nutshell, I need to take the 3 inputs, and search across all the
> tables, and get ranked results.
>
> The only answer I see, which seems to be kludge, is to create another
> table with one column that concats all the indexable columns for all
> the tables.
>
> Doing a monster union with multiple contains/free/??? on each select
> seems really ugly and would kill performance.
>
> Am I missing the boat, or does anyone have a better solution?
>
> All comments are REALLY appreciated, as I just pulled out the last hair
> on my head!
>
> Thanks.
>

"woody" <shellymatthys@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1116653626.176052.180040@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> Thanks for the input. Don't believe even a single table would do it
> since the data would reside in multiple columns, and any/all search
> words could be in any of the columns.
>
> But since there really isn't that much data (most columns are like
> author, title...), I'll probably take the approach of slapping all in a
> single column. Kind of tastes bad, but not talking about too many rows
> (15000ish), and it would make life a lot easier.
>
> fyi, the faq link you provided cleared some things up. Thanks!
>