Fun with CTXCAT

Oracle provides a full text indexing type called CTXCAT, which can be thought of as a low-maintenance full text index. You don't have to worry about synchronizing, which makes updates happen in real time. It is best used for things like document title searches, product names, and the like -- the syntax is easy, but you have very little power or control to do the sexy, cool full text search that a Context index gives you.

Except -- you can actually embed a Context 'CONTAINS' clause within a CTXCAT 'CATSEARCH' clause and get the full power [well, a good chunk of it anyway]. The syntax is a little painful, but very repeatable. As an example...

Contains clause to do a fuzzy search on the word 'column' in the doc.text column:

select docid, score(1), title from doc
where contains (text, '?column', 1) > 0
order by score(1) desc;

You cannot duplicate this with a standard CATSEARCH clause. However, using a query template you can extend the catsearch clause to perform a contains search (substitute < for [ because I can't figure out how to tell it to turn off HTML processing) :

select docid, title from doc
where catsearch(title,
'[query>
[textquery grammar="context"> ?column
[score datatype="integer"/>
[/query>','') > 0;

Viola! Fuzzy searching on a CTXCAT index.

The Full Swing

Golf is best thought of as the act of trying to smack a small white ball a quarter of a mile into a four-inch cup, three tries is good, four reasonable, and anything more unacceptable.

I would really like to try that again soon, but won't be holding my breath.

Intuition

So Tom Kyte has a post today: http://http://tkyte.blogspot.com/2005/04/things-you-know.html answering "[how] do you prioritize what "new things" you'll be learning first?".
One of the comments dealt with intuition, and it occurs to me that intuition is what you call 'good guesses'. People always extrapolate based on what they know [or think they know] -- if there's a more fundamental definition of learning, I don't know what it is.
However, are some people better extrapolators than others? I spent a couple of hours today working through a problem with a couple of people. They had been working on a new package for about a week, and were basically stuck. They had tried "everything".
So, here I am, looking at a package that I've never seen before in my life, and, after taking a little while to undo a portion of "everything" they had tried (to set the system up like I thought it was intended to be), we got it working. As I look back, most of the things they had tried were pure guesses, and had little to do with solving the problem.
I don't know exactly what to make of this, or most importantly how to help them pick a successful approach, but that's the challenge right now.

Me and My kids

Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition

I've been watching blogging since ... well, before it even really started. I sipped from the cup of Dave Winer when he was publishing DaveNets via email, then switched to reading them from his website, then heard him giddily begin to promote 'Weeblogs'.
I've never taken the plunge, first because I'm not sure I have anything metaphysically earth-shattering to say, but mainly because I'm not confident that I can keep writing something every day.
But Google has made the cost of entry so low that I can't help but try.
So -- here's hoping that there's something to say tomorrow. 'Till then...