database dave

I work for an online auction website, Trade Me, and as such collect quite a large quantity of search data (i.e. full text searches that people perform).  Over the years I’ve been involved in various aspects of our search; from tweaking the nuts and bolts of the full-text search itself (see my blog posts about [...]

Part 1: Cleaning up parentheses in a string Part 2: Replacing alternate operators Part 3: Splitting the search string Gee, it’s been over a month since my last post already! Since then we’ve been crazy-busy at work, but the good news is that we have a few promising DBA candidates to interview over the next [...]

Part 1: Cleaning up parentheses in a string Part 2: Replacing alternate operators We’ve now got to the point where we have a “clean” search string.  The next step is to split the string into rows which we can then manipulate without having to traverse the string itself. There are many “split to row” table-valued [...]

In this post I’m going to deal with another piece of the puzzle that I described in part 1. Now, after re-reading that post it became obvious that I probably need to outline what the end result is meant to look like: We want to be able to pass in a search string, and get [...]

Part 1: Cleaning up parentheses in a string Part 2: Replacing alternate operators Part 3: Splitting the search string Part 4: Wrapping it up A few years ago I wanted to have a crack at improving one of our websites’ search by providing “search operator” functionality.  These are basically special words or characters (i.e. operators) [...]