SQL question related to searching Keywords

Hello,
I am developing a web-search engine for a web-site. Client is HTML and i connect to an Oracle database through JAVA Servlets/JDBC. Part of the web site is stored in a database so i decided instead of searching the full-text to add a "Keywords" attribute to my tables and search only the keywords. It is supposed to be more efficient...is it ? My question is how should i write the SQL statement that compares the user's entry in the HTML textbox to the Keywords column. If for example the keywords are stored in an VARCHAR2 column named KEYWORDS in a comma delimited fromat : keyword1,keyword2,keyword3 and the user enters in the text box 'Alex'.
SELECT * FROM TableName WHERE 'Alex' LIKE .........what ? If i could parse and tokenize the KEYWORDS column values then i could for example write :

SELECT * FROM TableName WHERE ('Alex' LIKE keyword1 OR 'Alex' LIKE keyword2 OR 'Alex' LIKE keyword3)
Is there a SQL function that can help ? Or is there a different approach to searching keyword ? Not to mention the case where the user enters more than one word in the text box......

I also thought of storing the Keywords values in a separate table which will have a many-to-one relationship to my master table. In that case every keyword willl be stored in a separate record and i don't need to parse and tokenize... but i will incurr the performance degradarion because of the join operation.

Thanks,
Alex.

. Received on Tue Dec 14 1999 - 22:55:59 CST