Constructing a good search query using system.data.oracleclient

Question

I am constructing a search function in a class to be used by several of our asp pages. The idea is simple, take a search term from the user and query the database for the i

Answer 1

Instead of doing the concatenation in your VB code, do the concatenation in the SQL statement. Then what you're trying to do should work. Here's some SQL illustrating what I'm talking about:

select ID_ELEMENT, ELEMENT_NAME 
from table_of_elements 
where upper(ELEMENT_NAME) like ('%' || upper(:searchterm) || '%')

BTW, you might end up with more efficient queries if you switch the collation on ELEMENT_NAME to case-insensitive and then remove the calls to upper().

Answer 2

Since you're using oracle, another option would be to use Oracle Text to perform the search.

It can take a bit to set up properly, but if you have a large amount of text to search, or have some sort of structured data, it can offer you many more options than a simple wild-card comparison.

It also has some nice features for dealing with multiple languages, if you happen to have that problem as well.