Actually there is alot you can do by creating categories for the search criteria. E.g., create radio buttons for an age categories: or geographical categories: Unfortunately, it appears that since your database only contains "age" as in number of years instead of a birthdate, you're not going to be able to generate very meaningful results. OTOH if you were storing birthdate, you could calculate their age and wouldn't have to rely on the users keeping it current.

Doing anything of this sort will require a good deal of work (either in requesting additional information from your users or in adding new categorization fields and keeping those fields updated). If you periodically calculate the categorization data and store it in files or databases it will decrease the amount of time it takes to process the searches. People move occasionally and so you would also need to periodically check their geographical categorization.

Once you've decided how to categorize your data, you can use either method suggested by dws or belg4mit to implement your searches.

--Jim

In reply to Re: Search Categories - Most efficient way by jlongino
in thread Search Categories - Most efficient way by perleager

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