Ross, I disagree that interMedia Text is "way too slow to scale". Our experience has convinced us that I/O bottlenecks are the main performance killers with large interMedia Text indexes. The problem is that it takes some experience to find out how this "special" kind of index is structured (6 or 8 separate table and index segments per "index") and how it behaves. As usual, the Oracle docs are pitifully inadequate - you've gotta search through TechNet and MetaLink for details and bug workarounds (like CACHE instead of CACHE READS for DR$<>$R).
Caching the DR$<>$R segment helped immensely and I can see that when pieces of the DR$<>$X index are cached, queries with terms in those pieces are lightening fast. I am betting that when I spread the DR$<>$I table across multiple drives, instead of the single drive ours is currently on, we'll see much better performance of NEAR queries (which depend on the word position info. there), as well as faster index resyncs. In 9i Domain Indexes become partitionable, so I'm looking forward (in about a year - experiences with 6.0, 7.0, 8.0 and 8.1.5 have made me wary) to putting our 6 (or more) months of docs into one partitoned table. There may be other I/O distributing kinds of enhancements by then, as well. For sure I'll have explored every trick I can think of! ;-) With more drives and a bit more RAM, I think we can handle 10 million docs per month (60 million total online), even on our lil' ol' Win2k box. That's just x3 to x4 of what we do now. Jack -------------------------------- Jack C. Applewhite Database Administrator/Developer OCP Oracle8 DBA iNetProfit, Inc. Austin, Texas www.iNetProfit.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] (512)327-9068 -----Original Message----- Sent: Thursday, October 04, 2001 5:36 PM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L *excellent* post. thanks. Anyone out there put the indexes and tables on solid state disk? They have ssd up to about 10G and higher, I hear....just curious, not trying to invoke a global listserv discussion on how it "can't work" or "wouldn't be worth it, especially on microsoft platforms", etc. It would be neat to hear about an InterMedia indexing miracle. This really neat tool just sounds WAAAAAAY to slow to scale at this point, which answers a pet question of mine. (Something like "Why do services like 'Ask Jeeves' suck so hard?") In Love and Peas, etc. -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: Jack C. Applewhite INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services -- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California -- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists -------------------------------------------------------------------- To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).