map a search: best strategy?

[John Smith]

guys,
i am adding map to a search. the kicker is that the search database is not
postgresql and not spatial while i got only postgresql. the approach i've in
mind-

1 run search
2 create results xml
3 geocode results xml
4 read geocoded xml OR csv using odbc/ovf

it's all good except it sounds like too much back and forth.
since the search database doesn't change much it might be best to create a
shapefile with all points in it and show results using FILTER "string"? i
don't think map_layer_feature_points is going to work since it doesn't show
attributes on query and i am talking about 5000 results. none of ITEMNQUERY
ITEMQUERYMAP ITEMFEATURENQUERY will work either since there're 2 different
databases.

anyway i searched our gallery and 1 cool application searches like so-
http://www.carto.net/williams/yosemite/sendNameData.php?searchstring=M&searchtype=starts%20with&offset=0&limit=12&filterByMapExtent=false&xmin=256800&ymin=4166200&xmax=295200&ymax=4214800.
there's another about excavations in italy where the points are dynamically
generated from mysql using mysql2shp but pg2shp won't help here, right?

btw when you answer just remember i am a pure cgi kinda guy ;).
jzs
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