About Catalog Information Applications

The stored catalog information consists of text information, such as book titles, and related structured information, such as price. The information is usually updated regularly to keep the online catalog up to date with the inventory.

Queries are usually a combination of a text component and a structured component. Results are almost always sorted by a structured component, such as date or price. Good response time is always an important factor with this type of query application.

Catalog applications are best served by a CTXCAT index. Query this index with the CATSEARCH operator in the WHERE clause of a SELECT statement.

Figure 1-3 illustrates the relation of the catalog table, its CTXCAT index, and the catalog application that uses the CATSEARCH operator to query the index.