Spotlight

[Trevor DeVore]

On May 26, 2005, at 9:52 AM, jda wrote:

>>  > Hi all. Has anyone explored the possibility of making a V2 database
>>>  searchable with Spotlight?
>>
>> We have not study deeply what Spotlish can do for database.
>>
>> I have read that it build own indexes.
>> But this have no sense from point of view of DB.
>>
>
> I'm not sure of what value it has, either, but some of my users want 
> to be able to do Spotlight searches that find text in V2 records. This 
> might be of value if they have many different databases, and want to 
> find one that contains a certain name or term.

I found this at the 
<http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/9>:


"It does seem like a bit of a hack—and potentially wasteful—to store 
both a monolithic database file and a bunch of individual data files 
for a given data set, but Spotlight as it currently exists is doggedly 
file-granular. There must be an individual file camped out in the file 
system somewhere for each entry in the Spotlight to metadata store.

Apple is apparently working with at least one third-party developer, 
Microsoft, to see what can be done in this area. Here's what a 
Microsoft representative had to say.

[Spotlight] won't index Entourage and that's simply due to the way that 
Spotlight was made versus Entourage. Entourage saves everything in a 
database format and we are working with Apple to see how Spotlight can 
index the database."

So apparently SpotLight doesn't work with databases right now.  I 
*think* you would have to write out individual files that SpotLight 
could search.


-- 
Trevor DeVore
Blue Mango Multimedia
trevor at mangomultimedia.com