[Sigia-l] The Horror of Access Database

[karl fast]

> It blows my mind when the Users continually request search
> conventions established in Access when those Access query
> conventions do NOT match any of the standards, conventions, or best
> practices of traditional web-based search queries.

Whoah!

This is not Access. Any relational database product will have the
same query conventions. Filemaker, SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, etc.

Web search engine queries have their roots in full-text information
retreival systems. The query model in a relational database does not
function the same way. You don't use an RDBMS because you want to do
full text searching (though some RDMBS packages now include full
text search options for their fields, SQL does not support something
like this).

> To me the greatest frustration of any search functionality [from a
> User perspective] is achieved by entering query after query which
> comes back with a null set of search results. 

Yes, this is a problem. You can do work on the interface side to
improve this. But you can get null results in a traditional IR
system too. 

> Surely there must be a happy medium and a better way than the
> Access way.

It's not "the Access way" it's "the relational database way."


--karl