too many hits?

Dear Joachim,

> Joachim Schmitz writes :
> 
>  lately I get messages from the RIPE database when querying it with whois
>  that there are too many hits, e.g:
> 
> jade$ whois -h whois.ripe.net "Stefan Anders"
> The index search returned too many hits.
> Please refine your search key.

As I explained you before (when you asked why the database software
couldn't find "Frank Simon") the database software treats the arguments
as a list of separate searchkeys, not as one key. Then it is easy to see
that 'Anders' and 'Stefan' both give too many hits in the database:

$ grep \*pn: ripe.db.pn | grep -iw Stefan | wc -l
    149
$ grep \*pn: ripe.db.pn | grep -iw Anders | wc -l
    254    

>  I had a look at the database and there are exactly three entries which
>  contain the string "Stefan Anders":
> 
> jade$ grep "Stefan Anders" ripe.db.pn
> *pn: Stefan Andersson
> *pn: Stefan Anders
> *pn: K A Stefan Andersson
> 
>  Does not seem to be a lot, does it? Is this an error of the database
>  software or is it an indexing problem (there have been other problems
>  reported on the indexing software in the last weeks...)?

So, no it's not an error or indexing problem. It is an design issue.
Changing this behavior can be done but might cause other unwanted effects
for people (or tools) that make use of this feature that look for more
objects at the same time.

Kind regards,

David Kessens
RIPE NCC database software maintainer