CONTEXT index vs a CTXCAT index

Question

I'm puzzled as to which of these indexes is meant for what purpose. I like the auto-update feature of the CTXCAT index, so I'm leaning that direction.
Here's our situation. We have a table with about 2 million rows, where there's an EMPLOYER_NAME field. Users are constantly executing queries like:
where EMPLOYER_NAME like '%CHEVRON%'The CTXCAT index is also described as "Typically, with this index type, you index small documents or text fragments". I would consider this EMPLOYER_NAME column (VARCHAR2(50)) to fit this description, more or less.
The main thing that has me confused is that our vendor is pushing for a CONTEXT index, as they've got experience setting these up. We're not storing "text consists of large coherent documents.", but we are storing plain text.
Could someone offer some guidance? Thanks for your help,
--=Chuck

Answer 1

Depends on whether the words are predictable. You indicated in your first post they are employer names. If they are then presumably there is a table/list of valid values. Otherwise a CTX index may be your best shot but understand that you will be indexing every word and, I assume, most will be irrelevant.