[Koha-zebra] Re: [Koha-devel] playing with the zebra on cvs head

[Mike Rylander]

On 8/14/05, Sebastian Hammer <quinn at indexdata.com> wrote:

[snip]

> Doing the lookups required to show circ status for a screenful of records
> isn't a big deal. It's more complicated if you want circ status to be a
> searchable (like a filter) or sortable field, and retain the scalability of
> Zebra's query engine...

[snip]

Along these same lines, will the Zebra index be able to filter on
parts of the MARC record's fixed fields?  As an example, one of the
search requirements for Evergreen is to be able to limit a search to
just books or just video recordings (type of record), or even to large
print books (form of item).

I have no idea if this is possible using Zebra, but the way we solved
it was to create a table containing the parts of LDR/008 that are
important for filtering a search and to join to that in the initial
search query.  I'd be very afraid of serializing these steps, as it
would make getting accurate hit counts very expensive and would scale
horribly.

Again, I don't know if that is possible in Zebra, and I hope that it
is.  It's just the tip of the iceberg when dealing with very
denormalized data like MARC record fixed fields in a storage mechanism
that is mainly targeted at full text indexing.  Searching by language,
although this ought to be possible using structured data, is similar. 
I can imagine catalogers wanting to sort records by edit date, or
gouping them by encoding level.

( Hoping, for everyones sake, that my worries are unfounded. :)

-- 
Mike Rylander
mrylander at gmail.com
GPLS -- PINES Development
Database Developer
http://open-ils.org