Help/suggestions for Bible search program

[Mythos44]

Hail to All,

I am about to start on a Bible search program and didn't know the best way to go about it. I know there are many out there but this is just a project that I've always wanted to try. Here is what I'm wanting to do:

search for a word and display the verses that contain that word.
Search for a phrase same as above.
Add notes to a verse.
Goto book, chapter, verse directly.
And many more features

right now I'm trying to figure out the best way to store the book's text. Should I put it in an Access database file? Then the question is would they have to have access or would my program still be able to use the file type?

I figure I would create a tablethat contained the following columns:


Book_Name
Chapter_Number
Verse_Number
Verse_Text
User_Notes


Any advice or suggestions would greatly be appreciated.

Mythos

[jmcilhinney]

If you want advice on database design then your post belongs in the Database Development forum. You should have separate tables for books, chapters, verses and quite possibly notes too. Your word search would be very slow unless you pre-built an index because you'd have to perform a LIKE query on every single verse. To make it usable I think you'd have to have a table for words and then a word:verse table too. Your search would then just find the word in the word table and then get the verses that contain it directly from the word:verse table. Creating this index is feasible because I'm fairly sure the words in the Bible aren't going to change too often.

[Mythos44]

Thanks so much for your quick response. This is not just a database question it was more of a whole application question. Thanks so much on the word:verse table that is awesome. How about the database itself? Can I use an access database file if access is not on the machine? Or should I use another type not that I know of one.

Thanks again for you help.

Mythos

[jmcilhinney]

No, the Access application is not required in order to use an Access database in a VB.NET app. There are other options but Access will do the job.

[si_the_geek]

As your question is not based around code etc, it does not belong in the VB.Net forum - thread moved to Database Development forum (the General Developer forum might also be apt, but this seems best at the moment)