Database Software

We are currently using Oracle Text to search XML documents we have stored in a CLOB field, and feel like we have reached the limits of what the technology is capable of and are seriously considering completely abandoning it and using Solr instead.

Our findings have been very similar to what another group has found (http://blog.digicol.de/2009/01/13/moving-from-oracle-text-to-solrlucene/), highlights from this other group that we also ran into are close to their findings:

•Unstable query performance: In some installations, a few simple search terms would take up to fifty times longer than others, which caused us a lot of headaches and loss of reputation. That was an extreme case, but in general the performance of Oracle Text varied way too much. (And we invested a lot of time in finding ways to optimize it.)
•Oracle Text is hard to scale: Since it’s integrated into the database, you have to scale that as a whole (via RAC), which is expensive and inflexible. There’s no way to split a large fulltext index across lots of servers.
•It is missing support for total document count and faceted search; if you’d like to fetch the first ten matching documents only, you have to run a second search to get the total count.
•Oracle support often wasn’t very helpful; Text doesn’t seem to be a high priority product for them and it’s hard to find someone at Oracle who knows Text very well.
•While the database integration is a nice feature on one hand, on the other hand it makes it hard to customize what’s going into the fulltext index, and the fulltext index synchronization can slow down batch jobs.
•Today, every customer wants a Google-like query syntax, which isn’t provided by Oracle.



The big show stopper for us the absense of the ability to provide faceted search capabilities from result sets provided when searching with Oracle Text? Am I missing something, is there an easy way to do this? Is there a compelling reason to soldier on with Oracle Text?