On 06/07/2009, at 12:05 PM, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
2. 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(a)wikimedia.org
http://werdn.us