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

[Ian Haywood]

On Fri, Aug 20, 2004 at 09:22:12PM -0700, J Busser wrote:
> this would be immensely helpful to be searched but perhaps it will
> reside in a non-demographic table among other types of health insurance
> numbers and may be less manageable?
No, the demographics server can support arbitrary IDs. 

> Does postgres support index or key files and does gnumed use them?
Postgres does support indexes and they are used liberally in gnumed.
However they are not "files" as such -- postgres is a higher level database
than Foxpro or MS-Access and as users we don't get involved in what is or is 
not a file.

Note all indexes do is accelerate searches at the expense of inserts/updates - 
you can still search by non-indexed columns. 

> Is searching faster by maintaining an index or key of 
> upperCase(surname) and uppercase(givenNames)
Not significant AFAIK

> O"Malley
> 
> 2) spaces
> de Groot
> - would people want the above accounted for?
AFAIK we already do.

> SOUNDEX ()
yes,

Ian

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