Perhaps the Derby generated columns feature would be of help.
You could write some code that would generate the search values by processing your blob of data, then build an index on the generated search terms. Knut Anders has a nice writeup of generated columns here: http://blogs.sun.com/kah/entry/derby_10_5_preview_generated And you can find more reference material about generated columns in the Derby docs at http://db.apache.org/derby/docs/10.7/ (which seem to be down at the moment, otherwise I'd give you a better link as the reference, but look in the reference guide for the CREATE TABLE column definition pages. thanks, bryan