re: [Gnumed-devel] type of search pattern for demographics

[sjtan]

> Select * from patients where 'firstname like 'pe*' and lastname like 'bl*',
> order by id, surname, firstname, street, suburb, postcode, dob. > list> pick
> one. Name is plonked in top bar and under the hood the datbase is queried for
> all the clinical records for a patient with the unique Id from this query.
look that's just too simple. In these times of intellectual property 
rights and evergreened patents, we should all be forgetting
about the  universality of sql and go for some propriety query 
mechanism; not sure if Xpath  falls there.

actually,  maybe it is valid to say that sql isn't that universal 
sometimes :
in postgres , the above 'pe*' and 'bl*' becomes 'pe$' and 'bl$' ; also 
not sure if postgres has a "set ignorecase off"
( I think "ilike"  is a ignore-casing  "like" ) ,
- and  using the "*" field operator in select ,  means the dbapi
cursor.description  list object  might be needed to extract the field 
name order, but that's just a nitpick (as is everything else).