Re: About full-text search and XPath

[Tom Bradford <bradford@dbxmlgroup.com>]

Jeff Greif wrote:
"If you don't care where in the text you're searching (whether it's in
the title or the excerpt), and you're never going to be searching for
the strings 'title' or 'excerpt', then you could just use grep.  XML 
databases and search engines aren't necessary, nor would they be as 
fast, most likely, unless they indexed the documents in some way 
(Patricia tree or inverted file) based on the text content.  You'd be 
more likely to find this in a text indexing system not specialized to 
XML."

Jeff, 
For a handful of documents, this may well be true.  It's limited in that
there is no syntactic context that filter by, but it will work.  But
it's an untruth that an XML database wouldn't be necessary or fast for
managing many of these documents.  Regarding indexing and speed, that's
primarily what XML databases do, otherwise the word database wouldn't
really apply.  The types of indexing that they support depends on the
implementation, but full-text inverted indexing is definitely something
that most of them do.