[Koha-devel] Searching: Zebra

[Stephen Hedges]

Joshua, I saw that you and Chris had been kicking this around on IRC, and
it seemed to me then that it was a great idea.  Now that I've seen it run
(on a database that I know), I am really impressed.  I think you've found
something that would really be good for Koha.

Stephen

Joshua Ferraro said:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I've spent the last couple of days playing around with Indexdata's
> Zebra (http://www.indexdata.dk/zebra/). Zebra is another example
> of a textual database engine.
>
> Zebra can natively index MARC records, so I started by dumping out
> NPL's records (which took about 20 minutes).
>
> Indexing 150K records took just under 3 minutes and all the searches
> I've done using Zebra's integrated Z39.50 Server have taken less
> than a second. I haven't had a chance to write a wrapper yet to
> integrate the search into our existing code but you can try it out
> at the LOC's generic Z39.50 gateway:
>
> http://www.loc.gov/cgi-bin/zgate?ACTION=INIT&FORM_HOST_PORT=/prod/www/data/z3950/locils.html,66.213.78.76,9999&CI=034920
>
> This link will allow you to search NPL's 150K database (you could
> also use any Z39.50 client (like Yaz) to do the search. The server's
> IP is 66.213.78.76:9999 and the db name is VOYAGER (because that's
> the only way I could get the LOC's gateway to connect).
>
> Zebra is very high performance (it's in use for systems with tens
> of millions of records). It supports incremental database updates
> on live systems, exact boolean search expressions, relevance-ranked
> free-text queries (not sure about stemming).
>
> Of the searching ideas we've come up with so far this one is by far
> the most impressive. There are still some other textual database engines
> out there (lucene, clucene, xapian, namzu, to name a few), so if anyone
> would like to try these out and commit some sample indexing/searching
> scripts I'd be happy to try them out.
>
> Coments, questions?
> --
> Joshua Ferraro               VENDOR SERVICES FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE
> President, Technology       migration, training, maintenance, support
> LibLime                  Koha ILS, Mambo Intranet, DiscrimiNet Filter
> jmf at liblime.com |  Full Demos at http://liblime.com  |  1(888)KohaILS
>

-- 
Stephen Hedges
Skemotah Solutions, USA
www.skemotah.com  --  shedges at skemotah.com