AC Gold Search Providers

[bkort@web2market.com]

Our clients would like to know more detail about the options for the 3 search providers: SQL, SQL Full Text and Lucene. I'm wondering if there is any documention, a post about these 3 providers or some kine of 3rd party site(s) I can reference? I haven't been able to find anything in the forums of wikis.

[AbleMods]

The merchant guide found at http://help.ablecommerce.com has the most detail.

Search Provider - Choose your preferred search provide, Lucene (FTS), SQL, or SQL FTS. The Lucene search engine is preferred, but may not work in all environments. The SQL search providers are not as fast as Lucene, but are guaranteed to work for all installations. [NEW in R3]

NOTE: There will be a difference in your search results depending on which provider is in use. This is due to different behaviors between FTS (Full Text Search) and SQL search abilities. FTS based searches look for exact words in a result set. For example, if you perform an admin search for "hard" using Lucene or SQL FTS, it will only list the results where it finds the complete word "hard". So, when searching in the sample data, both Lucene and SQL FTS will only list the "hard" drive products.

Whereas the SQL provider makes use of criteria queries where it uses a LIKE expression to search the results. A Like operator is very loose considering it will list any result having the partial search keyword within it. SQL is able to list orders by using LIKE operator, and results are provided while searching through Billing and Shipping information of a user named "Richard", while both Lucene and SQL FTS are unable to find the exact word "hard" within "Richard".

When the Lucene search provider is selected, it will initiate a re-index of the database which may take some time. The SQL search provider is the default because it is guaranteed to work in all installlations.

[bkort@web2market.com]

Hi Joe:

Thanks, it's a start. I'm wondering what fields in AC get searched for each of the providers? Also, what are the pros and cons of each provider? The purpose is to be able to help clients determine the best choice for their site. At this point we just do trial and error.

I can find documentation like this for Lucene:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucene

Is there any better place to look for documentation on these providers?