amazon-web-servicesfull-text-searchamazon-rdsamazon-simpledb

Full text search with Amazon Services


I would to move my application to Amazon SimpleDB, since I’m not going to maintain database service on my own. This application lives under heavy load. There are a lot of reads/writes per second. I don’t need consistency and atomicity and I want to keep things as simple as possible, so SimpleDB is good choice.

The problem is, that I need full-text search capacities. And I don’t know how to make it better with Amazon SimpleDb. I had implemented before hand-written full-text search with MongoDB database. I had to split text to words in my application layer, and build my own index. It was not hard, but I don’t want to do it again with SimpleDB.

I found an interesting article http://codingthriller.blogspot.com/2008/04/simpledb-full-text-search-or-how-to.html

But I would like to not have to implement it myself. I’m looking for a pre-made solution

What are the options?

Is it better to use Amazon RDS + Lucene?

Or probably there are out of the box solutions for SimpleDB?

Requirements are:


Solution

  • Lucene or similar is usually the way people do it, but not knowing what platform you're working with its hard to suggest anything in particular. Simol is an .NET object-persistence framework for SimpleDB which can use Lucene.NET for indexing. I've also looked at some basic Lucene.NET examples which aren't too bad. If you're looking for a hosted indexing service you could take a look at this question.

    For your indexing to do its job well, you're more than likely going to have to tailor it to your application.