Mon, 21/01/2008 - 01:01 — peterv

We are evaluating different solutions for search in Rails. The "logical" choice proposed is Ferret (a Lucene clone for Rails). But now I bumped into this recent thread (started Jan 4, 2008):

http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/137629#616449

where a number of people mention serious stability problems with Ferret. The alternative (with less features but far more stable and performant) that seems to be proposed is "sphinx". From this recent thread, Ferret seems too risky for the first version. I might even just use a plain simple SQL "like" or "rlike" or a "fulltext match" to start with. Actually, for Postgresql tsearch2 gets thumbs up (but we settled for Mysql for now ...).

Any hints from local experiences? Thanks in advance ...

update: might check-out tsearch2 on the PostgreSQL developer room at fosdem ...

update: the discussion is ongoing on the BRUG mailinglist.

update: we are going to production with the Ultrasphinx/sphinx solution. See my more recent posts for details.