Re: Followup: opinions on Search services

[Jamie McCracken <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

Liam R. E. Quin wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-04-06 at 23:35 +0100, Jamie McCracken wrote:
>
> > Cause its not just about indexing - We have metadata too and that really 
> > needs a DB. If all you want is a google on your hard drive then yes a 
> > dedicated indexer would be best but an RDBMS will give you expanidbility 
> > and flebility in handling structured metadata with more powerful search 
> > options.
>
>
> Well, it gives you marketing hype for sure.
>
> It turns out that the text retrieval packages also store metadata.
> For that matter, an XML-native database such as Sleepycat's of the
> Apache stuff might be worth considering.  Using a relational db for
> metadata and a native text retrieval format for postings can be very
> effective, as long as the integrity between the databases is managed.

I doubt that - think of the problems of cross querying that data.

EG say I want all doc files created after 1 APril 2005 that contain the 
word "office"

With an SQL DB (EG an embedded one like SQLite or Embedded Firebird) its 
trivial to do it all in SQL effortlessly and quickly. Conversely, your 
method would involve getting *all* files which contain the word "office" 
and then matching that list to the SQL result set - yuck! That couldn't 
be more slow and inefficient!

btw, OS/X spotlight uses SQLite for both indexing and metadata and I 
suspect Longhorn will do something similiar with its SQL server as they 
have now shit canned winFS.

jamie.

> Liam