Create a Search Engine with SQL 2000 and ASP.NET C#

Question

I am looking to create a search engine that will be based on 5 columns in a SQL 2000 DB. I have looked into Lucene.NET and read the documentation on it, but wondering if anyone has any previous experience with this?

Thanks

Answer 1

i haven't dealt with Lucene yet but a friend of mine has and he said that their performance was 4 to 5 times better with lucene than full text indexing.

Answer 2

Performance better? I think that largely depends on volume and how you expect the data to scale.

SQL Server Full Text is far superior in my opinion. To get this to work with lucene you will need a process to maintain the index by extracting data from the SQL database.

Answer 3

You cam either use a Lucene Index or SQL FTS Index. I personally lean toward Lucene from a simplicity standpoint. It is also not a black box. Alot of which solution will work (and they both may work) depnds on query load, data size and data update frequency. Lucene does provide a well worn path to building very scalable search solutions for websites. In the future please include some more information about your problem.

Answer 4

IMHO it's not so much about performance, but about maintainability. In order to index your content using Lucene.NET you'll have to create some mechanism (service of triggered) which will add new rows (and remove deleted rows) from the Lucene index.

From a beginner's perspective I think it's probably easier to use the SQL Server built-in full text search engine.