Fulltext Search in Firebird

Source: http://www.dotnetfirebird.org/blog/2005/01/fulltext-search-in-firebird.html

Firebird doesn't support fulltext search. You need to rely on third party tools. That seems odd, but it doesn't have to be so bad as it looks at first.

I am using DotLucene. It is an open source .NET library (ported from Java) that can index any data (structured or unstructed) that you are able to convert to raw text.

On a server, it is no problem to store the index in a separate directory (you can also load it to RAM to make your searches super fast - if you have enough RAM, of course). In a desktop application, it might be useful to store the index in a Firebird database.

For example: MySQL fulltext search has these drawbacks (compared to DotLucene):

• You can use it only in MyISAM tables (i.e. no transactions)
• You can't browse the index (see Luke)
• You need to store transformed text in the DB (i.e. HTML without tags)
• It doesn't support highlighting of the query words in the result
• You will hardly modify the sources to do custom changes
• The license doesn't allow to use it in commercial application for free
• It is reported to be slow on large data sets