[Info-vax] Looking for some text search ideas

[David Froble]

Perhaps in place of discussing non-existent malware on the non-existent 
VMS on x86, I might solicit some ideas.

Our applications are not using a RDBMS.

A request has come up to be able to find any data which contains some 
specific text.  An example might be any product description that 
contains the text "gasket".  Using keys won't help, because the key 
might be "head gasket".

This is similar I believe to the SQL request something like

SELECT * from PRODUCT where DESCRIPTION %like% gasket

My perspective is that on today's systems with gobs of memory that much 
of a database's information is probably in memory, thus not incurring 
the overhead of lots of disk seeks.

It's also my perspective that such a search is a sequential pass through 
the data looking for matches.

And so this is my question.  Does anyone know of a more effective method 
than a sequential pass through the data of searching a list of data 
looking for text matches?

I'm looking at possibilities from global data making the search 
available to all, to storage inside the one function currently needing 
this capability.  Some more research into the application needs will 
determine the answer to this question.