Integrate Lucene or any other search product with SQL Server 2005

Question

Hi,

I need to use full text search with SQL Server 2005 and I have explored its inbuilt search approach (SQL Server full text indexing) but it seems less powerful.

I have also looked features of Lucene.

Now my questions: Is is possible to integrate Lucene and SQL server in anyway?

1. Can my T-SQL queries use Lucene index for returning results? (May be uses CLR based function internally)
2. How to update Lucene index while data in the tables are getting updated
3. What can be overall architecture?
4. Are there any commercial products available which provides this kind of support?

Thanks, HB

Answer 1

If you use Hibernate, Hibernate Search is a nice option.

It can index and synchronize your data to Lucene indexes. You can issue text queries via the Hibernate search API and it will return the domain objects matching the queries.

Answer 2

You should look at Apache Solr - built around Lucene, and use Solrnet to query Solr. Solrnet offers a quick and easy way of interacting with Solr from ASP.NET.