another lookup problem

Wilfried,

>  What's the *inherent technology* difference between a registration
>  lookup and a general white pages service? 

Registration lookup deals with hierarchical namespaces, thus enabling
delegation of authority.  A general whitepages service deals with flat
namespaces which are much uglier to deal with, particularly as the
database scales.

In addition, registration lookups (should) result in a boolean result,
it is either there or it isn't.  A general whitepages service can
result in multiple hits, requiring additional resolution.

>  Do you reaaly know about the transcription? 

I try not to, however sometimes various APNIC members update the APNIC
database with local character set data, even though I whine at them
when they do.  This is something I'd like to avoid as you can get
unexpected results (Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and I think Vietnamese,
and Thai use sequences prefixed by escapes to describe characters --
sometimes these can form words that get entered and looked up in
indexes).

>  Then I don't understand why we have the recursive lookup for person
>  objects...

Because person objects are indexed (or did I misunderstand the
question)?

>  Those of us who have to work with end-users have to process a lot of
>  requests that involve dealing with person objects. Whether they are
>  directly indexed or just referenced doesn't make a big difference.

I understand.  As I'm not a complete fanatic (:-)), I wouldn't throw
out the person name indexing without providing a replacement that
would allow people to lookup their names (I've been playing around
with LDAP -- seems OK, particularly given some browsers are now
appearing with LDAP clients).  In the white pages record would be an
(optional) entry for NIC handle(s).

>  I want to find out whether some guy or gal is already in the DB - full
>  stop. And it's more comfortable to do that with a wildcard replacing a
>  "sharp s" or an umlau than being "radical" and try all the different
>  possibilities that I can imageine.

This is a hard problem.  My concern is that if you throw in stuff that
would allow fuzzy searches, you'll end up making the code more
complex, slower, and the resulting index files will likely get (much)
bigger.  An alternative solution, already proposed by David (:-))
would be to mirror the appropriate database files and use grep (or
more reasonably, given the requirements, glimpse or agrep).  While
somewhat lacking in elegance, it'd probably be faster (given network
latency).

Regards,
-drc