Patent ID: 6556990
Filing Date: 2003-04-29
Classification: G06F,Y10S

Abstract:
A method for facilitating an efficient wildcard search on a field within a relational database, comprising:receiving a query with a search string that includes a wildcard and a sub-string; wherein processing the query involves identifying rows in a table in the relational database in which a target column contains a string that matches search string; wherein matching the search string includes matching an expansion for the wildcard in the search string; looking up matching rows in the table that match the search string by looking up the sub-string in a sub-string index for the target column, the sub-string index allowing a given string in the target column to be rapidly identified based upon a sub-strings of the given string, wherein the sub-string index includes a second table in the relational database, and wherein the second table includes a first column containing strings from the target column and second column containing corresponding sub-strings of the strings from the target column; and accessing the matching rows in order to process the query.