Thank you for asking for more info, rather then saying it has to be relational, relational, relational!!

To use your terminology it looks like I am doing a complex search - the vast majority of searches we do (probably over 95%) are to partialy match fields.

So if I have a field with this text in "Timbrals Theatre"

then a search on "Tim" would be a match. The script also has a 'match whole words' option, which if activated would mean the search on "Tim" would fail, but a search on "Timbrals or Theatre" would match.

From the context its ounds like teh relational solution would struggle here - is that right?