V6R1 to Bring New OmniFind Text Search Server

Published: February 5, 2008

by Alex Woodie

One of the new goodies IBM is introducing with i5/OS V6R1 is OmniFind Text Search Server for DB2 for i5/OS. With this new offering, IBM is allowing users to conduct full-text searches across documents stored in their DB2 for i5/OS database (sometimes called DB2/400). In other words, if you want to find every single document containing the phrase "Bob likes ice cream" stored on your System i server, OmniFind Text Search Server is the product for you.

OmniFind is IBM's enterprise search offering for helping organizations index and subsequently find specific pieces of information stored across corporate intranets, the Internet, or even on an individual PC. It reads and indexes text with practically no regard for the underlying format, and then creates an index of that data that can be searched very quickly and efficiently, according to IBM. The product supports more than 50 languages (with "advanced linguistic" support for 24 of them), and offers out-of-the-box support for a variety of back-office data stores, including IBM's WebSphere Portal, Domino, and FileNet platforms, Microsoft's SharePoint Services, and EMC's Documentum.

Today, IBM sells various flavors of OmniFind, including an Enterprise Edition, a Starter Edition, a Discovery Edition, a version specifically for Yahoo!, and one designed for DB2 for z/OS. And approximately six weeks after i5/OS V6R1 becomes available in March, IBM will add a customized DB2/400 edition of OmniFind to that list.

With OmniFind Text Search Server for DB2 for i5/OS, IBM says users will be able to select a DB2 record based on the text of one or more documents stored in the record itself. Documents stored in DB2 are indexed by the OmniFind search server, and the resulting index is stored on the server's file system. So when a full-text search is performed against the documents stored in DB2, the search expression is compared with the index, and any records that match the search criteria are returned in the result rows, according to IBM.

Just about any type of document can be supported with the OmniFind offering, including XML, HTML, PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, RTF, Lotus 1-2-3, Lotus Freelance, Lotus WordPro, and JustSystems Ichitaro. The software can also create full text indexes over any character or binary data column, including: BINARY, VARBINARY, BLOB, CLOB, DBCLOB, GRAPHIC, CHAR, and VARCHAR data.

The offering will include a set of stored procedures for enabling and disabling indexing and searching. It will also include two built-in functions, CONTAINS and SCORES, that can be used to search documents stored in the DB2 table.

OmniFind Text Search Server for DB2 for i5/OS will require i5/OS V6R1 and will be available May 9. For more information, see the IBM Software Announcement: www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?subtype=ca&infotype=an&appname=iSource&supplier=897&letternum=ENUS208-020.

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