[Koha-devel] full text search

[Pat Eyler]

On Tue, 3 Dec 2002, paul POULAIN wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm playing with full text searches, that enables you do search very
> fast in a db, it replaces the where field like "%xx%" that is VERY slow
> on big tables (non indexed search).
> It's really a nice feature : immediate result for a search on a 400 000
> lines table ! The same search with like %xx% is... more than 30s long
> (full parsing of the table) !
> The problem is that i think this feature is not ANSI-92, so is mysql
> only compatible.
>
> Do you think we should ignore this feature, or become definetly mysql
> based product ? (unless it's ansi92, in this case, please say it !)

There are three avenues I think we could explore here (maybe more, I've
been known to overlook things):

  1) ignore this feature and stick to ansi92 so DBI buys us DB
independence.  In practice, this is not really where we are right now
anyway, and we'd lose a nice optimization

  2) buy into this feature and become MySQL dependant.  Most ILSs are DB
dependant (I think), so this is probably not too big a cost.

  3) buy into this feature, but start to split our architecture along
layers.  If we have something like -

          presentation
          ------------
         business logic
         --------------
        business objects
        ----------------
           data store


as our target, then it will become easier to plug in optimizations like
this (or maybe using Inline::C to write even faster DB access routines
where needed) without mucking up the entire system.  Similarily, we could
more readily swap out presentation bits to fit on non web/cgi frontends
more readily (e.g., resurrecting Steve's PerlTK frontend, or creating
koha.el for the truly tech-savvy librarian).

Of the above, I'd really like to see us move toward item three.  I think
the longer term benefits (perhaps in the post 2.0 world) buy us too much
to overlook.

-pate

>
> documentation :
> http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/Fulltext_Search.html
>
> --
> Paul POULAIN
> Consultant indépendant en logiciels libres
> responsable francophone de koha (SIBGB libre http://fr.koha.org)
>