The Excalibur Text Search DataBlade Module

The IBM® Informix® Excalibur Text Search DataBlade® module allows you to perform more sophisticated searches by dynamically linking in the Excalibur class library, or text search engine, to perform the text search section of the SELECT statement, instead of having the database server perform a traditional search.

The text search engine is designed to perform sophisticated and fast text searches. It runs in one of the database server-controlled virtual processes.

When you execute searches with the Informix Excalibur Text Search DataBlade Module, instead of using LIKE or MATCHES in the SELECT statement, you use an operator called etx_contains() that is defined for the DataBlade module and that instructs the database server to call the text search library of functions to perform the text search. This operator takes various parameters to make the search more detailed than one using LIKE.

With the Informix Excalibur Text Search DataBlade Module, you can enable faster searches by creating an etx index on the column that contains text data users might want to search. An etx index is a specialized type of secondary index you can create with the etx access method, which is described in the next section.