I don't know if we're all talking about the same thing. If it's searching multiple
databases *on the same server* then much of this discussion doesn't make sense to
me. Or are we talking about different servers? ....

Robert Sanderson wrote:

> > and/or (and this is the tougher one)
> > b) You want individual hit-counts rather than a single count, as was
> > assumed in Z39.50 (at least without additional search info)
>
> .. this looks like a killer argument against it. At least it has me
> convinced :)  I can think of plenty of times when I'd want to know how
> many results came from each database.

But how did you implement that in Z39.50? We developed SearchResult-1 for this,
but did anyone ever implement it? And why couldn't that be done on an
index-by-index basis same as database-by-database?


> Can I also add:
>
> c) Even if you want to send the same -query- to each database, it's very
> unlikely that you'd want to retrieve the same -record schema-.

Similarly, we invented compSpec so we could request different syntaxes for
different databases.  Who implemented it? (And that could have been expressed by
index instead of database, too.)

> If one of the databases doesn't have the requested schema, even if it has
> matching records, it'll fail with an Unsupported Schema for Retrieval
> diagnostic.  You'll also want to know the resultset name for each
> database if you're going to try to retrieve the record again directly from
> the source.

When did we ever get separate result sets for different databases, with a single,
multi-database search?


--Ray