Using indexes in Alpha Five V. 7?

[Bill47]

I'm a non-programmer trying to evaluate Alpha 5 Version 7 for use to develop a job board, i.e. a website where users post jobs and resumes. The limiting factor in the past has been the speed that the resume search can run at. There are about 7,000 resumes in the database now, but with the new website I'm contemplating, that number could conceivably be higher - say 20,000 or 30,000. Anyway, even with 7,000 resumes the search was painfully slow when we used mysql. We are now using asp pages with ms sql and the search is great. In evaluating A5, I'm trying to figure out how it will work in searching resumes. The main problem with resumes is that they have very large sections of text on which keyword searches have to be done. For example, an employer might want to do a search to find all resumes in which the phrase "wiper design" was found. The search has to go through every resume (some of which can have up to 20,000 characters in the experience section) and look for that phrase, so you can understand why it might be slow.

I have managed to create a database using A5 with all my current resume data in it, but the search is unacceptably slow even on my own computer. I believe using indexes would speed this up, but I have looked and looked in the help section and can't find a simple explanation of how to use them. There are some sections about indexes, but they seem to assume you already know how they work. I have managed to create a couple of indexes but don't know how to use them in a search. I saw a post on this board saying that if you had created indexes, then the search would automatically be faster, but I tried a search after having created the indexes and it wasn�t any faster. It seems to me there must be some way to direct the search to look in the indexes, but I don�t see anything in the help files. It would be great if there was some documentation explaining the use of indexes completely, but failing that can anyone help me?

Thanks,
Bill Denham

[russ Boehle]

search text

If you have to search a lot of text you can use locate text (do a search on this in the manual) This will be slow.
Also notice in the index builder there is full text search. This will create and index of the text and do the text search faxt, at the expense of disk space.
To use this you will search on a string value.

Russ

[Edward Larrabee]

You will find that the new StringScanner object in version 7 provides significantly faster string manipulation (including searching) functions.

[Bill47]

Follow-up/evaluation

Thanks for the answers! I actually did do a full-text indexing and still found it slow. However, it may just have been the way I did it or whatever. But what is becoming apparent is that to do this properly I will have to get into the programming, and if I have to get into coding anyway I may as well use MS SQL and asp pages, since my current website is in that format. The reason I was interested in Alpha5 was that it is supposed to be a program that allowed a non-programmer like myself to build database-driven websites, but it looks like that is not really the case unless you are doing something really simple. At least I know for sure that MS Sql/asp does a fast search on the resumes, while with Alpha5 that is an unknown at this point.

Is there any reason I should consider Alpha5 rather than learning MS Sql? The only one I can think of is that it will be more difficult to learn. But besides that, are there any advantages to Alpha5 over MSSql?

Thanks in Advance,
Bill Denham