Search Values of Array in "One Go"

[Richard Gaskin]

Sannyasin Brahmanathaswami wrote:

 > OK so let's say user  want sto search "blues"  and I want the UX to
 > check *all* columns in the array.  What is the best way to do this?
...
 > Is there a more efficient approach?

At my local Linux User Group last year a fella from NASA gave a 
presentation about a system he'd developed for querying planetary data 
via URLs.

The data is huge (basically everything every interplanetary 
satellite/robot delivers to JPL) and his choice of HDF (Hierarchical 
Data Format) as the storage base was interesting in itself (imagine a 
large encoded array but designed for traversal on disk).

But even more so was his query API.  A thing of beauty.  One-line URLs 
could be entered in a browser to locate just about anything in the 
massive HDF store.

Ultimately it could be seen as a simplified form of XQuery, every bit as 
elegant and flexible but without the XML-specific cruft (having to 
account for the mix of elements and attributes).

Of course this led me to thinking of ways to use this for LC arrays.

It should be possible to craft a library to allow XQuery-like one-liners 
to locate anything anywhere in any array.

It should also be possible to do this in the engine with 
blindingly-faster efficiency.

But as a starting point, fleshing out the API in script seemed at least 
a good first step.

I do not have the time to pursue it in earnest.  But XQuery is well 
documented, and a sufficiently-inspired person may be able to come up 
with a pretty great query system given sufficient time to explore the 
possibilities...

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
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  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com