[thesite] d.e.o. Review

[Ron Thigpen]

I'll second this recommendation.  There is some setup involved and the indexes
must be kept up to date (easy to do), but there are some great benefits.  

This approach puts much less load on the database server.  Searches generally
return results in about 1/10th the time of running SQL, YMMV of course.  If
nothing else, you should do a test index run and compare performance and load
effects with the SQL approach.  This was basically what converted me. 

There is also a great deal of flexibility in this approach.  Multiple indexes
can be created, one per column of interest for example, and then spanned when
searching.  Checkboxes on the search form give the user control over which
collections are searched within.  

The Verity search language is also quite complete, with easy to implement
operators that handle stemming, proximity and the like.  See:
<URL:http://www.allaire.com/cfdocs/Developing_Web_Applications_with_ColdFusion/11_Indexing_and_Searching_Data/dwa11.htm>  

You generally only expose some of the language's functionality, but it is always
an option to link to some docs and provide a free-text search interface page. 
Given the audience, this might be a well-used interface. 

--rt


Judith Taylor wrote:
> 
> Well, one thing you might look at is using Verity to create indexes of the
> data....I know it's fairly straightforward for use with ColdFusion....