CF9's Apache Lucene vs SQL Server's full text search?

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+2 Q:

CF9's Apache Lucene vs SQL Server's full text search?

ColdFusion 9's full text search is now based on Apache Lucene Solr (or Verity, but it has too much limitations). We also use SQL Server.

Which one's better? Which one's easier?

UPDATE: going to use for... searching against the name & description fields of the Products table.

Thanks!

+1 A:

The important question: What are you going to use it for?

Can't pick the right tool for the job when you don't know what the job is ;)

Shannon Hicks 2010-05-26 18:14:21

Henry 2010-05-26 18:18:18

+1 A:

Here's my 2 cents tested with ~ 3 000 000 of images with captions (primary key + image caption text from 100 to 500 chars):

CF9's Solr implementation is fast in returning results, really easy to setup, fairly fast during building index.

SQL Server 2005 FTS wasn't good enough, tried it some time ago and didn't put it in production. SQL Server 2008 FTS is much better though, currently using it on our application. But basic setup had to be adjusted in order to get high level results.

Based on experiences of other colleagues working with huge data sets and applications mostly based on search and finding things I made my top list:

Lucene
Tuned SQL Server 2008 FTS
Solr
SQL Server 2005

Of course CF9's Solr is winner here if you are chasing fast setup since you need 3 tags to finish the job and get awesome results.

zarko.susnjar 2010-05-26 19:53:56

btw, what's the diff between Lucene and Solr? thx.

Henry 2010-05-26 21:44:14

Performance wise Lucene should be faster considering that you don't need all features of Solr and you build search indexing, text filtering and parsing exactly how you need it.Another plus IMHO for Lucene is that you have one thing less running separate form your main application in servlet container.As I said, we use SQL server FTS, but for preparing texts, parsing, filtering etc. we are using Lucene library with javaLoader.cfc.

zarko.susnjar 2010-05-27 07:19:49

@Henry - Lucene is a search library, originally written in Java, but ported to several other languages and environments. It is low-level, takes a while to learn and has lots of search functionality. Solr is a search server built on top of Lucene and runs as a webapp in a servlet container. It is much easier to set up and use. I am not certain that Solr's performance is slower than bare Lucene, as the Lucene community describes Solr as "Lucene Best Practices", which means that many parameter settings for Lucene are chosen in Solr to be optimal. Both are useful FTS products.

Yuval F 2010-05-27 07:58:13

ansaurus

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CF9's Apache Lucene vs SQL Server's full text search?

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