Removing Automatic Wildcard Searching in Maximo

Resolving The Problem

Many attributes in Maximo are flagged as searchtype = WILDCARD, which causes Maximo to wrap the search string with percent signs and use it in a LIKE condition unless the search string is prefixed with an equal sign. This can cause performance problems because a condition of the form WONUM='%123%' cannot use an index.

These can be changed by changing the searchtype from WILDCARD to EXACT. Only alphanumeric Maximo datatypes (UPPER, ALN) can be set to a searchtype of WILDCARD. Numeric, date, and Boolean datatypes are always EXACT.

The searchtype of EXACT works as follows. When you enter a string, it will search for that exact string. If you want a wildcard search, you must enter the percent and/or underscore signs manually.

You can change all of the searchtypes from WILDCARD to EXACT, but be aware that this will cause all lookups to require exact strings for matching. (For example, if you use the Worktype lookup in Workorder Tracking you will not be able to type a partial string and have the pop-up find all worktypes which contain that string.)

To change all of the WILDCARD searchtypes to EXACT do the following:

1. Shutdown the Maximo Application Server(s).

2. Make sure you have a backup of the database in case you want to revert your changes.

3. Execute the following two updates against the Maximo schema via an interactive SQL utility.

update maxattribute set searchtype = 'EXACT' where searchtype = 'WILDCARD';
update maxattributecfg set searchtype = 'EXACT' where searchtype = 'WILDCARD';
commit;

4. Start the Maximo Application Server(s).