• Search is tough but can be made to work well in an RDBMS. I was once tasked with doing a database that took every major news story from around the world published on the internet and archived them so the text could be displayed on a website. I was asked to provide 'google-style' search, and an automatic feature that listed the most widely covered stories in the day. It was SQL Server 2000 at the time, and the archive was immense. I won't say it was easy, but it worked eventually. With five years of news stories and just under a terabyte of data, it was never taking more than a third of a second. It became easier with SQL Server 2005, of course, and I used the hard-won techniques for several other applications.

    Best wishes,
    Phil Factor