[Ferret-talk] Need some information about Ferret

[Jens Krämer]

Hi!

On 30.11.2008, at 09:49, Lyes Amazouz wrote:

> Hi everybody!
>
> In our company, we want to use Ferret as the main index/search  
> engine of our applications. And we are looking for some testimonies  
> about how Ferret is efficient when deployed in production.
>
> * Was Ferret already deployed in production in some companies? is  
> there some testimonies about that?

Yes, I use Ferret whenever I need some kind of search for a site or  
application I'm working on. Usually these are full text searches for  
product catalogs and/or html content - not really large scale, at most  
around 10000 documents. Most recent example is www.fahrrad-xxl.de.

We also use Ferret + aaf in a knowledge management system I'm working  
on for xscio AG (xscio.de).

> * What is the maximum number of documents we can index with ferret?  
> Has some one informations about that.

I have no idea whether there is an upper limit for the number the  
documents other than the maximum value a Ruby Fixnum instance can  
have...

> * What is the best way to access a very huge Ferret Index? May we  
> distribute it on several machines or not?

Afair there's no way to distribute an index across multiple machines  
built into Ferret. You could do the distribution yourself of course by  
clustering your data and distributing across several independent  
ferret indexes. Downside is that search result scores from different  
indexes aren't directly comparable.

> By the way, can Ferret read Solr indexes as they are both clones of  
> luceen?

Ferret isn't really index compatible with Lucene anymore, it uses a  
slightly different index format mostly due to differences in the  
representation of utf8 values, but I think there were other changes,  
too.

Oh, and Solr also isn't a clone of Lucene, it's a search server that  
internally uses the Lucene library.


Cheers,
Jens

--
Jens Krämer
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