Thanks, that is interesting.
Your query times give me pause. Ideally, I'd be shooting for about 1sec on most searches. If 5+ second query times are the norm, that kind of kills it because this thing would be used for quite frequent lookups. Obviously, I don't want to spend weeks building this thing only to find out that it's too slow to be practical when I load it up with all my data, so I'll have test any tool I consider with all the data before I go ahead.
Now, many searches could be done as full word searches. Would those be radically faster than general substring searches if I were to use sql via DBI:DB or something similar, or would I need to use something that was optimised for text search (e.g. Lucene/Solr) to get that performance benefit? I posted a question on FTS in reply to NetWallah's post further down that's kind of related.

At this point the whole thing is just an idea I'm considering. I guess I will play with some of the tools suggested here, and maybe look into completely different approaches like trying to use libreoffice base.

In reply to Re^10: Writing a database lookup tool by elef
in thread Writing a database lookup tool by elef

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