hacker, the second example doesn't work because of the %$name being interpolated inside the double quotes. Single quotes is a saves a bit of typing over qq{}.

As a solution to the initial problem pointed out by dws the work-around in Oracle is to use InterMedia indexes for full text searches of VARCHAR2 and LOB data. They can be a bit tricky to set up initially but do work well when you get them going (make sure you monitor the CTX server process).

rdfield