concordance (dataflight) issues...migrating to oracle

hello,
I started working at a site recently that is having many problems with the concordance product from a company called dataflight www.dataflight.com The dataflight manuals state clearly that concordance has a 4GB file size limit. They're hitting this barrier often with the indexes. They scan a lot of documents and build indexes out of that. The sizes of the databases ( there are several ) are already past 60GB, and they system has only been online for about 6 months! So.....I have to figure out a way to solve this! The #1 complaint from the users is performance, slow searching, frequent crashes on the server (it has 2 win2k servers - new Dell boxes - the boxes are pretty beefy but it still hangs!) I'm trying to come up with a spec! Since the data size is huge, my only conclusion was to use oracle products. They have a novell infrastructure and implied that they'd like to stick to novell as much as possible. Pervasive and mysql run on novell, but I haven't found any convincing evidence to show that those rdbms systems will handle a fast growing system with huge amounts of data. If the data amounts were smaller and not growing so fast I'd consider one of those. My question (to the experienced/senior guys) is what experience have you had getting data out of concordance? Have you guys ever even worked with it? It seems to be a pretty popular product in the legal market. But the technology it uses is old! So far from what I can tell it doesn't have a true RDMBS as a database engine. This is the main cause of the problems this site is experiencing...at least as far as I can tell. I've also confirmed that the only way to get the data out of this system is by doing an export (the system can dump to an ASCII text delimited file). It would've been nice to have odbc or something like that....oh well. I've looked in newsgroups but the only instances I find for concordance are very old threads (from the early to mid *90's). Is concordance doing well as a product? Are there other products you've seen that work similar?
I'm trying to come up with a spec to design a custom system for this site. Oracle would be the database engine, I'm considering using either oracle IAS or coldfusion to build the application. I also have to find a document management system. I've been looking at software products from Canon and Xerox...but they're pretty closed and built to use MS SQL as a database engine! The canon one is called imageware www.imageware.com Has anyone seen any other similar products that don't require MS's dirty hands and that are a bit more open so it can be integrated to a custom app?

Also....for any of the senior guys/consultants, if you have time for work, please respond to this - I have to start hunting around for help with this project. My friends in NYC are the ones I usually work with but they're very tight on time. I don't know too many people where I'm living now (Houston) and I feel more confident working with people I know or any of the senior guys on the oracle servers list than I would posting a job for a few good programmers on monster.com or the local paper! I've been a regular reader (don't post too often...but I know the regulars) since 1998.

Thanks...sorry for the long post!

Oskar Received on Wed Jan 21 2004 - 00:38:36 CST