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(C) IBM Corp. 1996, 1999

Text Extender: Administration and Programming


Text Extender

Text Extender adds the power of full-text retrieval to SQL queries by making use of features available in DB2 UDB that let you store unstructured text documents of up to 2 gigabytes in databases.

Text Extender offers DB2 UDB users and application programmers a fast, versatile, and intelligent method of searching through such text documents. Text Extender's strength lies in its ability to search through many thousands of large text documents at high speed, finding not only what you directly ask for, but also word variations and synonyms.

You are not restricted to searching only in text documents stored in DB2 UDB databases, you can also search in text documents stored in files.

Text Extender can access any kind of text document, including word-processing documents in their original native form, and offers a rich set of retrieval capabilities including word, phrase, wildcard, and proximity searching using Boolean logic.

At the heart of Text Extender is IBM's high-performance linguistic search technology. It allows your applications to access and retrieve text documents in a variety of ways. Your applications can:

You can integrate your text search with business data queries. For example, you can code an SQL query in an application to search for text documents that are created by a specific author, within a range of dates, and that contain a particular word or phrase. Using the Text Extender programming interface, you can also allow your application users to browse the documents.

By integrating full-text search into DB2 UDB 's SELECT queries, you have a powerful retrieval function that combines attribute and full-text search. The following SQL statement shows an example:

SELECT * FROM MyTextTable
  WHERE version = '2'
  AND DB2TX.CONTAINS (
              DB2BOOKS_HANDLE,
              '"authorization"
                IN SAME PARAGRAPH AS "table"
                AND SYNONYM FORM OF "delete"') = 1

DB2TX.CONTAINS is one of several Text Extender search functions. DB2BOOKS_HANDLE is the name of a handle column referring to column DB2BOOKS that contains the text documents to be searched. The remainder of the statement is an example of a search argument that looks for authorization, occurring in the same paragraph as table, and delete, or any of delete's synonyms.


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