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Hi all,
I (think I) want to create for Item Master/Inventory/Tools/Stocked Tools/Service Items a SIMPLE single search box. You know, the way if you were searching for a part on Amazon or Google (or just about any online retailer) they present you with ONE search box that searches for description, part number, model number, attribute, etc.
How would you do that in Maximo, using the tools available within either Maximo or the underlying DB? A view in DB Config to join the Item, Invvendor, and ItemSpec tables, concatenating the fields in question, and maybe a custom app to utilize it?
This would be for Maximo 7.6, SQL Server 2012.
Travis Herron
>>I (think I) want to create for Item Master/Inventory/Tools/Stocked Tools/Service Items a SIMPLE single >> search box. You know, the way if you were searching for a part on Amazon or Google (or just about any
>> online retailer) they present you with ONE search box that searches for description, part number, model
>> number, attribute, etc.
I guess your inspiration would be that massive doclink query that screws up attached documents.
I would approach a massive aggregation as a materialized view, largely to save time when it comes to actually searching the collated results you put together. Substring searches are a pain, so you couldn't use this paradigm: 'xxx' IN (col1, col2, col3 ... , colN). IBM is using the text search functions of Oracle and SQL*Server, so I'm wondering if maybe you should perhaps look at the db vendor solution to construct results, then find a way to get at them with a simple keyword.
For Amazon and those big retailers, they toss all keywords into "no SQL" key-value lookups that they call databases but are really just big lists. Nothing relational about it, but it can be fast if you use bitmap indexing (I think). The approach might be to pull all keywords from a row, and drop them in a big list table with the id and the keyword. So if you had an item with eight keywords, you'd insert:
(itemid, keyword1), (itemid, keyword2) ... (itemid, keyword8)
And you'd do this for all tables. Then, when you go to search, you are just searching on any matching keywords. Once you get a list of IDs, you then can use this:
id IN (col1, col2,...colN) where your columns are whatever table-column pairs you need.
The best part is you can segregate the results by table when you perform the final id IN (..) search.
So that might be fast, might not, but if I was doing a senior project, or I worked at IBM's R&D for Maximo, I'd spend a day or so working it out.
-C