On 06/07/2009, at 12:05 PM, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
- The info won't be up-to-date. Would it be too much to ask to search
the database directly using regexes?
Yes.
We wouldn't allow direct searching from the web interface with regexes for two related reasons:
1/ A single search with the most basic of regexes would take several minutes, if not hours. It isn't computationally trivial to search for a small string in a very large string of over 10 GB, let alone a regex. Words can be indexed, regexes cannot.
2/ Even if we could find a way to make the former performant, a malicious regex could significantly expand this time taken, leading to a denial of service.
-- Andrew Garrett Contract Developer, Wikimedia Foundation agarrett@wikimedia.org http://werdn.us