Xref: utzoo comp.databases:1100 comp.sources.wanted:4374 misc.wanted:2461
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!munnari!vuwcomp!dsiramd!csnz!paul
From: paul@csnz.nz (Paul Gillingwater)
Newsgroups: comp.databases,comp.sources.wanted,misc.wanted
Subject: Re: Info on free-text databases wanted
Summary: brs/search
Message-ID: <35@csnz.nz>
Date: 15 Jun 88 16:27:33 GMT
References: <799@stride.Stride.COM>
Reply-To: paul@csnz.UUCP (Paul Gillingwater)
Organization: Computer Sciences of New Zealand, Wellington, NZ
Lines: 25

In article <799@stride.Stride.COM> clindh@Stride.COM (Christer Lindh) writes:
>I'm looking for free-text databases with extended search-functions
>-- 
>        clindh@stride.COM        ::         The Fittest Shall Survive 
>   Stride Product Group, R&D     ::           Yet The Unfit May Live. 
>MicroSage Computer Systems, Inc. ::
>    Reno, NV, (702) 322-6868     ::               We Must Repeat !   

We've been working with and developing applications in a product called
BRS/Search for free-text work.  It runs under Unix and Xenix, as well as
other mainframe operating systems (there's even a DOS version!), and
has a very powerful search engine.  It features a menu generation 
language, print-time formatting, full ANSI Thesaurus, image storage
(yes! scanning handwriting too!), foreign language support, data comp-
ression, etc.

It's just a simple inverted file, but it indexes EVERY word (except
the common ones like 'the' or others you specify), and it is VERY FAST.
It's written in C, and there are ports for dozens of machines.  The
theoretical limits are 16,777,215 documents per database, each document
can have up to 64kb fields (or 'paragraphs') - and each field can be
variable length up to 64kb long!

My only criticism is its weakness in computation.  It's really text only,
although numbers from tables can easily be exported to, e.g. a spreadsheet.