[Koha-devel] New Koha 2.2 search....

[Ernesto Silva]

Hi,
    here at Universidad ORT Uruguay we've been using koha since may'05. 
Andres Tarallo and I were the primary developers, Andres is still with 
us but working on another proyect and we've hired Jean Pierre Ducassou 
to continue our Koha developement. And... no Paul, Jean Pierre is not 
french, but his ancients were.

Anyway, as our Koha 2.2 installation has it's own flavour and we were 
aiming to improve the search system we've made some work during 2006 but 
the developer we hired has gone away... pity.

We've been reviewing 2006 search code (with Jean Pierre) wich was based 
on MySQL 5 using sub-queries and Full Text Indexing. We've got a 95% 
working search system, we're giving it the final tweaks.

We were wondering if anyone is interested in it, we can contribute with 
the code, explanations and basic documentation.

The basics of the systems are:
- our own query language, simple but yet powerful.
- a parser to convert the query language expressions to sql expressions.
- a new table, similar to marc_subfield_table, but with a subfieldvalue 
field of blob type, and a nsubfieldvalue field of float type.
- full text indexing.

In our developement server (2 x PIII of 800 MHz) the new search system 
works very fast with 52000 bibles and 75000 items.

When the system is fully functional (in 2 or 3 days I hope) we will 
begin the migration off the rest of our Koha installation to MySQL 5, 
and when this is ready we'll put into the production server, I hope we 
can achieve this in October.

Sorry about my poor english and best regards,

-- 
Ernesto Silva.
Coordinador de Desarrollo Web y Sistemas Abiertos
Centro de Procesamiento de Datos
Universidad ORT Uruguay.
E-mail: silva at ort.edu.uy
Tel: (+598-2) 902-1505 ext. 206
Fax: (+598-2) 900-2952