Re: External search engine, advice

> I have an external search engine system which plugs in to postgres. I use a few
> C functions to interface the search daemon with the Postgres back-end.
>
> The best that I have been able to do is do a "select" for each result. I have a
> live demo/test site:
>
> http://www.mohawksoft.com/search.php3, and the PHP source code is at
> http://www.mohawksoft.com/ftss_example.txt.
>
> I would love to get the results with one select statement, but have, to date,
> been unable to figure out how. Anyone with any ideas?

It's possible to return a set of results from C functions using the
new function manager in 7.1 or later. Take a look at following email
in the archive.

Subject: Re: [INTERFACES] Re: can external C-function get multiple rows?
From: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
To: alexey(at)price(dot)ru
cc: pgsql-interfaces(at)postgresql(dot)org
Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 01:52:57 -0400

Actually I have created such a function calling an external full text
search engine called "namazu". Here is an example to search a keyword
"int8" from index files pre-generated by namazu.

test=# select pgnmzsrch('int8','/home/t-ishii/lib/namazu/hackers');
?column?
----------------------------------------
/home/t-ishii/lib/namazu/hackers/21000
/home/t-ishii/lib/namazu/hackers/21001
/home/t-ishii/lib/namazu/hackers/21003
/home/t-ishii/lib/namazu/hackers/21004
/home/t-ishii/lib/namazu/hackers/21002
/home/t-ishii/lib/namazu/hackers/21005
/home/t-ishii/lib/namazu/hackers/21006
(7 rows)
--
Tatsuo Ishii