Question

I just started learning about Lucene and I get how it can be very useful for searching documents and such, but does anyone use it for searching database data?

For example,

I need to make a search that will search for keywords based on two fields (“description”, “message”).

To do this I would need to write an sql query to return all the description rows, and all the message rows (could be tens of thousands), then from that create an index, and search the index.

Is my understanding correct? I would first have to get all the data from the database which could be huge.

Answer 1

Your understanding is correct.

You would have to create an index for Lucene based on a set as you indicated.
I would recommend Luke for viewing the indexes you created.

I have a warning though as to why Full Text Search is ultimately better —
Every time a value is updated, you have to update your Lucene index which is external to your database. This is overhead that I didn’t want to deal with and ultimately ended up abandoning this very approach.

FTS gives me just as good results, at least for my needs, yours may differ.