Zend lucene and MySql database

Question

I have a PHP web site with data stored in a MySql database. (approximately 50 000 articles) I want to improve the results of the full text search functionality and stop using just a simple LIKE query.

I find Zend_Search_Lucene from the Zend framework that seems to be a great tool.

Do you think zend search lucene is a good choice in my case ?

After indexing all my articles with lucene, do I need to keep the data in MySql or zend search lucene is enough to keep all the data ?

Thanks in advance,

Answer 1

I would investigate if MySQLs native Full-Text Searching would meet your needs first before jumping to a Lucene based solution. It is a major improvement upon using LIKE statements without the additional implementation required for Lucene.

Zend_Search_Lucene is a pure PHP implementation of Lucene and can therefore be pretty slow when used with large datasets. I would skip it and look at implementing Apache Solr. There is PECL extension for it, which is documented here.