[Tagdb] RDBMS, Lucene or both?

[Erik Hatcher]

On Feb 5, 2007, at 10:46 PM, Ace Jayz wrote:
> I've been grappling with a design of a bookmarking/tagging system  
> and I'm leaning towards storing the tag data in an RDBMS so that I  
> can answer fairly complex relational queries efficiently (will  
> probably use a 3-table schema similar to that of Toxi), but I'm  
> thinking about storing some data in a Lucene index for efficient  
> free text searching.  I looked back in the list archives and  
> noticed that a system based on a combination of a DB and Lucene has  
> been suggested here before.  Has anyone on the list implemented  
> such a system?  If so, care to share your experiences?  I've read  
> some posts from Otis G. about his Simpy system and I'm curious if  
> it fits into this mold or if it uses Lucene exclusively.  If Simpy  
> is not an example of a tagging system solely based on Lucene, does  
> anyone know of a full-featured tagging system that is?

I've been working on Collex <http://www.nines.org/collex>, which is  
Solr-based (Lucene underneath).  All tags/annotations as well as  
facets and full-text searching of objects are driven by Lucene.

We are working on distilling the heart of Collex's faceted browsing  
as well as tagging/annotating into a Ruby API and Rails plugins.   
This is called Solr Flare (and the underlying solrb library) <http:// 
wiki.apache.org/solr/Flare>.

And perhaps most relevant to your question is the consideration that  
the Solr team is paying to tagging, with use case and implementation  
possibilities being brainstormed here: <http://wiki.apache.org/solr/ 
UserTagDesign>.

	Erik