Ability to query on all columns from a view with multiple tables

Question

I have view with 4 tables. view has about 50 columns.
hypothetically, I want to build a form to give the user an ability to query on any of those 50 columns. user can search on one or more fields.
what is the best way to write the query to retrieve the results without performance impact.
please let me know if the question is not clear.

Answer 1

If you want to permit them to query any of 10 fields with no restrictions, you could create 10 separate single-column indexes. The optimizer would have to try to pick the best of these indexes if you specified multiple search criteria. But since you have a view which presumably means that you've got multiple other indexes involved for the underlying join conditions, you'd probably want/need to combine the column lists of the indexes you're adding for searches with the indexes you've created for joins, which requires looking at the text of the view and figuring out the best way to optimize the 10 single-column searches. Of course, it is possible that the optimizer could chose to do something like a b-tree to bitmap conversion on multiple indexes which could allow it to use multiple independent indexes for your queries, but that's generally not ideal performance-wise.
All this is a fancy way of saying that there probably isn't a cut and dried answer to your question. You need to figure out the queries you're trying to optimize (say, the 10 single-condition queries) and you need to figure out what set of indexes on the various underlying tables provides the best performance weighing those benefits against the cost on other side of maintenance during DML. Which is going to depend on the text of the view, the underlying tables, the existing indexes, etc.
Justin