Let me try to clarify some more. This is a description field with a
column type of text.
It's purpose is to store a description about something. If we were
talking about
products, it could be the product description.

Imagine we had a camera product we were storing. The desc might be
something
like:
================================================== ===========
Example Description Text

This new Sony camera provides 5 megapixel resolution for big prints
and photo cropping,
large 2.5-inch LCD screen, advanced optics and the appeal of
traditional
rangefinder shooting--so photo enthusiasts will have a camera thats
equally
adept at saving their memories and capturing their vision. It also
features a
3x optical zoom.
================================================== ===========
The description is descriptive text about what we are modeling.
You can't normalize a description like this out as they
will very from item to item at least in our application and there is
only one
description per item. I understand that many product types have
specification
lists and that can be normalized out to other tables and displayed
along with
description but that is NOT what we are talking about here.

When I said "terms" maybe I used the wrong word. Perhaps keywords
would
have been better. Using the above example, say the user wanted to
show
products where the description contained the keywords Sony, optical,
and new
but we wouldn't want to consider order as the user doesn't care what
order
they appear in but wants to see only the products that mention all 3
of these
things in the description.

Thanks for the input.

validus

> Rows with 3 terms where? If you have 3 different "terms" in a single field,
> then your database isn't even in 1NF. Normalise it and the problem goes
> away.- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -