[Brug-talk] Ferret - sphinx - Solr

[Peter De Berdt (10-forward)]

On 21 Jan 2008, at 12:14, Alain Ravet wrote:

> - did they use a recent version of Ferret/AAF?

The latest one

> - did they use it through a (Drb) server?

Yes

> - did they use it out-of-the box, or did they customize it?

Out-of-the-box, except for the hack to circumvent the to_doc error

> - did they use the basics features, or some of the advanced features
> (multi-indexes, etc..)


Depending on what you call advanced: yes, we used multi model indices  
for one. We also had to jump through some hoops to include related  
records in the main record index such as a mixin module to include  
polymorphically associated addresses, phonenumbers, … (these are  
linked to companies as well as people, …).

The biggest problem with aaf and ferret in general is that the  
corruption can not be reproduced easily. If I could just say: "do  
this, then that, and when you query it like so, you'll get a corrupt  
index", I'd be happy to post it on the ferret forum and get it sorted  
out or even do it myself and contribute a patch, but that's simply  
not the case. We had used ferret before it went DRB backed in  
production and faced the obvious corruption problems. Still, the  
Rails list had a discussion where some people said (iirc, the people  
behind the aaf plugin) all those problems had vanished now that they  
had solved the concurrency problem. Clearly, that's not the case. It  
has just made corruption less frequent for us.

I'm happy it works for you Alain, and I know you're working with huge  
datasets, but for us, where records are updated, deleted, created  
quite frequently, it's been hell. Still, I have to find a solution  
that works for us and is 100% reliable and sadly just supporting  
postgresql is out of the question (we could have used tsearch  
otherwise), because we need to provide our customers with a choice of  
database (and most of them opt for mysql). If I find a solution that  
gives me total peace of mind, I'll shout it out loud on every  
occasion I get, but currently, I can't.

Best regards.


Peter De Berdt

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