I see you are coming from the database world. To get a better understanding of Lucene, I would suggest you use the free version of DBSight, which let you create Lucene index with SQL after a few clicks.
Basically Lucene is more like a list of denormalized documents. So if you change your database schema, your lucene index would likely need to be changed and re-built also. The combined full text search and range queries are easy in Lucene index. You don't need to worry about it. It's a great question about 3). If anything goes wrong, you would need to rebuild the index. So you would need a mechanism to get prepared and rebuild the index when you need to. -- Chris Lu ------------------------- Instant Scalable Full-Text Search On Any Database/Application site: http://www.dbsight.net demo: http://search.dbsight.com Lucene Database Search in 3 minutes: http://wiki.dbsight.com/index.php?title=Create_Lucene_Database_Search_in_3_minutes DBSight customer, a shopping comparison site, (anonymous per request) got 2.6 Million Euro funding! On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 6:20 AM, Schreiner Wolfgang < wolfgang.schrei...@itsv.at> wrote: > Hi all, > > We are currently evaluating potential search frameworks (such as Hibernate > Search) which might be suitable to use in our project (using Spring, JPA > with Hibernate) ... > I am sending this E-Mail in hope you can advise me on a few issues that > would help us in our decision making process. > > > 1.) Is Lucene suitable for full text database searches? I read Lucene > was designed to index and search documents but how does it behave querying > relational data sets in general? > > 2.) Can we make assumptions on query performance considering combined > searches, range queries or structured data and wildcard searches? If we > consider a data structure consisting of say 3 tables and each table contains > a few million entries (e.g. first name, last name and address fields) and we > search for common values (such as 'John', 'Smith' and 'New York') where > > a. each value for itself and each combination would result in > millions of hits > > b. a person can have multiple first names and we want to make sure to > receive any combination of the last name with any first name > > c. we search for a last name and a range of birth dates > > 3.) Transaction safety: How does Lucene handle indexes? If we update > data model and index, what happens to the index if anything goes wrong as > soon as the data model has been persisted? > > I hope I made the issues clear to you, just some general thoughts about how > Lucene would behave in a real world application scenario ... Any support or > pointers to helpful documents or Web links are highly appreciated! > Cheers for now, > > w > >