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11 Enabling Search
With a SAP HANA database, your users will want to search tables and views much like they would when searching
for information on the Internet. In SAP HANA, you can either directly query data using SQL queries or you can
build search apps using a UI toolkit.
Before enabling search, you must meet the following prerequisites:
● Your SAP HANA database contains column-oriented tables.
● A valid data type is assigned to each column. The data types of the columns determine how you can query
your data.
In SAP HANA, you can search on single or multiple columns of almost any visible data type. In addition to standard
string search, SAP HANA also supports full text search.
During a full text search, the SAP HANA search engine examines structured text, such as author and date
attributes, as well as unstructured text, such as body text. Unlike a string search, for a text search, the sequence
of words and characters is not critical for finding matches. A full text index enables this functionality by analyzing
and preprocessing the available text semantically. This includes normalization, tokenization, word stemming, and
parts of speech tagging.
To enable search, proceed as follows:
1. Create any required full text indexes for the columns in the table.
○ For columns defined with the data type TEXT or SHORTTEXT(n), full text indexes are automatically
generated. For columns of any other data type, you must manually create any required full text indexes.
○ When you create a full text index, you can also define synchronization and trigger text analysis.
2. Build SQL search queries.
○ Search queries use the SQL SELECT statement.
○ For searches on large object types or text, the queries must include the CONTAINS predicate.
3. Optionally, build search apps using the UI toolkit for SAP HANA Info Access .
○ The UI toolkit provides UI building blocks for developing browser-based search apps for end users.
○ The UI toolkit is based on HTML5 and JavaScript libraries.
○ The UI toolkit connects to the database using the SAP HANA Info Access service that wraps search and
analytic SQL queries and exposes them through an HTTP interface.
11.1 Creating Full Text Indexes
When you create a TEXT or SHORTTEXT column in a table, SAP HANA automatically creates a corresponding full
text index. However, for columns of other data types, you must manually create and define any necessary full text
indexes.
SAP HANA Developer Guide
Enabling Search
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