Full Text Search in MDB Blobs?

[Christoph Müller]

Hi!

We are developing an application that archives files. The files are stored
in mdb-Databases in Blob(Binary)-Format. Now the customers want to do a full
text search. Is there a possibility to do a full text search on blobs in MDB
Databases? The programming language is VB6.

Thank you for your answer!

Sincerely,
Ch. Mueller
AIB Informatik AG

(e-mail address removed)

 

[John Nurick]

Hi Christoph,

As far as I know there's no simple way to do this. Certainly Jet doesn't
offer anything like the full-text search facilities of SQL Server.

Ordinary queries don't have access to the contents of OLE (blob) fields.
Possibly you could store the contents of your files in Memo rather than
OLE fields; that would at least provide a slow, stupid, sequential
search through the raw contents of the files, if that's worth having.

 

[Christoph Müller]

Hi John!

Thank you very much for your answer!

That's the thing i thought... I spent 2 days searching on this topic...

Will it be possible with using Microsoft SQL Server 2005 instead of Access
Databases?

Sincerely
Christoph

 

[John Nurick]

Hi Christoph,

SQL Server has had full text search for years, though I'm not familiar
with its capabilities. However, I don't know whether full text indexing
is available in the free SQL Server 2005 Express, or just in the
expensive versions.

 

[Guest]

You can connect Access to SQL Server. However, even if you
get a version of SQL Server with text indexing, I think the text
indexing only works on text fields - not on binary documents.
(but you need to ask that question in a SQL Server group)

If you want full text search on Word or PDF documents, I think
you will need to either (a) save a text version with the document
version or (b) save the documents outside the database, so
that Index Server (part of MS WebServer) can index them -
I don't think Index Server will index blobs in a database (but
you should ask that question in an Index Server group)

(david)