OpenText Analytics Database 26.2.x – Match and search functions

Sql-Reference: MATCH clause functions

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Used with the MATCH clause, the functions in this section return additional data about the patterns found or returned. For example, you can use these functions to return values representing the name of the event or pattern that matched the input row, the sequential number of the match, or a partition-wide unique identifier for the instance of the pattern that matched.

Pattern matching is particularly useful for clickstream analysis where you might want to identify users' actions based on their Web browsing behavior (page clicks). A typical online clickstream funnel is:

Company home page -> product home page -> search -> results -> purchase online

Using the above clickstream funnel, you can search for a match on the user's sequence of web clicks and identify that the user:

Landed on the company home page.
Navigated to the product page.
Ran a search.
Clicked a link from the search results.
Made a purchase.

For examples that use this clickstream model, see Event series pattern matching.

Note

GROUP BY and PARTITION BY expressions do not support window functions.

Sql-Reference: Regular expression functions

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

A regular expression lets you perform pattern matching on strings of characters. The regular expression syntax allows you to precisely define the pattern used to match strings, giving you much greater control than wildcard matching used in the LIKE predicate. The OpenText™ Analytics Database regular expression functions let you perform tasks such as determining if a string value matches a pattern, extracting a portion of a string that matches a pattern, or counting the number of times a pattern occurs within a string.

OpenText™ Analytics Database uses the Perl Compatible Regular Expression (PCRE) library to evaluate regular expressions. As its name implies, PCRE's regular expression syntax is compatible with the syntax used by the Perl 5 programming language. You can read PCRE's documentation about its library. However, if you are unfamiliar with using regular expressions, the Perl Regular Expressions Documentation is a good introduction.

Note

The regular expression functions only operate on valid UTF-8 strings. If you try using a regular expression function on a string that is not valid UTF-8, the query fails with an error. To prevent an error from occurring, use the ISUTF8 function as an initial clause to ensure the strings you pass to the regular expression functions are valid UTF-8 strings. Alternatively, or you can use the 'b' argument to treat the strings as binary octets, rather than UTF-8 encoded strings.

Sql-Reference: Text search functions

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This section contains text search functions specific to OpenText™ Analytics Database.