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Author  Topic  rchiav Starting Member 4 Posts Posted - 2001-03-26 : 12:53:46 I'll explain the background here so that everyone has all the info needed. I'm a NT/Novell SysAdmin with expierence in quite a few languages. I'm developing some web interfaces to a Microsoft SMS 2.0 database. The database is a SQL 6.5 server. One of the fuctions of SMS is to gather information on all executables on client systems. My customer has been requesting reports on this information so that he can be sure that everyone is complying with licence issues. The biggest problem here is that it gathers information on EVERY executable, and most of the info is not needed. What I originally did was write a perl program to read in a text file containing patterns to match on word boundries (e.g. "intel" would match "intel software" but not "intellimouse"). Then I made the information available via ASP pages and I have the ASP code read in the file, escape out any special chars "\ $ ^ * + ? ( ) | { } [ ] ." and then try to match each line against every record that was pulled in the query. This is very slow. Is there any way to have this done through a select statement? Can I put all of the patterns in a table and use it through a SELECT statement without iterating through each element? If someone were to run a query on all machines, that would mean that it would run the 300+ patterns against each of the 250,000+ inventory records. That's just not going to do. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks, Rich