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author's profile photo Wolfgang Röckelein
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Wolfgang Röckelein

CAP and HANA fuzzy search

Posted on Aug 03, 2020 at 06:37 PM 91 Views

I noticed in the release notes for 2020 that for $search the HANA fuzzy searched was replaced by the usage of LIKE.

Does anybody know what was the motivation for this?

I always thought it was cool to utilize a search engine which is capable of also finding slightly misspelled stuff.

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  • Lars Breddemann
    Aug 04, 2020 at 03:54 AM

    My guess is that this is in order to align with "being opinionated" about Higher-level concepts and APIs (https://cap.cloud.sap/docs/about/). To me, this reads like that no platform (in this case DB platform) specific features are used to make public APIs/public visible behavior.

    No other DBMS supports fuzzy search (and it comes with limitations concerning what column types it works on). So maybe the CAP developers thought it was a good idea to do what every other DBMS does: (ab)use the LIKE operator as a kind of largest common denominator.

    They've also done that with the implementation of temporal tables on HANA. While HANA provides specific table types for that purpose, the CAP implementation rolls its very own temporal table design.
    If my thinking is correct here, I'd consider it a mistake to not allow HANA to leverage its features. SAP made the mistake of supporting several DB platforms by using only the features that the DBs have in common before - not sure why this lesson doesn't seem to stick.

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