Wildcard on index loopkups

[Kenneth Brody]

Quoting Mike Schwartz (Mon, 3 Oct 2005 12:13:38 -0500):
[...]
>     I'm not aware of anyway to wildcard the first 6 digits of an index,
> but I thought some of you might have some ideas.

You can't wildcard index lookups.

Imagine trying to use a standard dictionary to find all words with "ing"
after the 6th letter.

>     One idea that I had was to read index "G" itself into filePro, then
> decode it and find the records that have this part number in them, and
> then do a record number lookup into the OE detail file to retrieve the
> parts info.

You could read the entire index and parse it yourself, and then lookup
only to those records where the key matched you criteria.  But, you're
going to have to scan the entire index in sequential order, and I'm not
sure if you're really going to save much time over simply reading the
entire file in record number order.

You say you'd rather not have an additional index built on the field
that you are trying to use here, but you have to ask yourself if the
reasons for not building an additional index outweight all of the extra
work needed to get around this lack of index is worth it.  Even with
two million records, once the index is built, you're not talking about
very much overhead for a 10-character field.

[...]

--
KenBrody at BestWeb dot net        spamtrap: <g8ymh8uf001 at sneakemail.com>
http://www.hvcomputer.com
http://www.fileProPlus.com