Hi,

I'd like to integrate olap searching with regular full text searching
so that my users can screen in the typical olap multidimensional
manner, but including results from a text index. I'm pretty new to
database development, and have worked through the AS tutorials as well
as documentation in msdn for fulltext searching. (i'd like to work
with the new sql server 2005 platform).

does anyone have an idea of how i could integrate these two?
Is this functionality already built into sql server or do i need to
query both and find the intersection externally? can I use an
user-defined assembly to do this on the server? Anyone else tried to
do this another way?

An example of the type of screen i'd like to run is -
find all my customers
in the 12345 and 23456 zip codes (cube dimension)
who have purchased sailboats (cube dimension)
and have "skipper" or "captain" in the salesman's notes (text field).

TIA,
-Ron

Hmm for something like that, you're dealing with an aggregate paradigm
(OLAP) and a detail paradigm (SQL). Using your example of:
just as you had noted, you want to obtain the zip codes and purchasing of
sail boats which presumably are organized as dimensions (something by which
you can group by). But once you go to the text field, you're asking for
something that has not been placed into the OLAP database. As OLAP can work
by itself and not need the data source(in MOLAP mode, once you have
processed the data), there is no link back to the SQL to allow for this
query.

Saying this, a way to do this is for you to build a "keywords" dimension or
have the "notes" as a member property or its own dimension such that you can
pivot your way around this. Saying this, this would really only be feasible
for smaller amounts of data as your dimension will have a new member for
each note which could get quite large.


--
HTH!
Denny Lee
<dennyglee_at_hotmail_dot_com>

Blog at:: http://spaces.msn.com/members/denster/



"Ron" <littlebear_hiding (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> wrote