Re: PLS/Excalibur vs. Oracle Text Cartridge

Before going any further it is important to note that I am an Informix employee in the DataBlade engineering group.

From what I have seen of the ConText middleware (because it is a cartridge in marketing terms only) it seems buggy and slow. Typical of many of these Oracle Data Cartridge solutions is that the data is stored outside the database. As a result, queries don't seem to scale very well and are held up by the CORBA architecture underlying the systems. The other problem with ConText as that if you should want to hook up any of the other cartridges with it, you need to purchase the Oracle Universal server that was modified to handle that sort of data. So in reality Oracle has about 6 different Universal Servers. In other words, 2 cartridges, 2 servers and all of the problems that go along with distributed joins and CORBA.

The Verity DataBlade seems to be much better in the most recent release. The query performance is roughly 10 times what it was 6 months ago and the early complaints of bugs are now addressed. The PLS datablade only exists for the Illustra server. The other DataBlade to look at is the Excalibur Text DataBlade. You can infact use both simultaneously on the same data and create both Verity and Excalibur text indices on the columns in question. Each DataBlade exposes a slightly different set of search capabilities. We currently have some newspapers with 100,000+ documents each with query times in the 10 second range.

It is important to remember that if all you are going to be storing is text documents then a straight PLS or Verity or Fulcrum system will probably outperform both ConText and Informix, since that is all it designed to do. The real power of these systems comes when you are relating different kinds of data in the database together and need to do queries. An example of this could be "Find documents that contain foo and were submitted within 100 miles of our sales office". Or another one might be "Find all Video clips that contain Jerry Seinfeld and also show the contracts specifying the rights to that particular clip."

I hope this helps
Al Landeck
landeck_at_informix.com
Principal Engineer, Video DataBlade

In article <6jegcb$7hg$1_at_apple.news.easynet.net>, Wai dat Chan <waidat_at_flirble.org> wrote:
>
>Hi all,
>
>I was wondering if anyone out there has had experience of both
>using the Oracle Text Cartridge and either PLS or Verity text
>datablade.
>
>If anyone could provide me with a brief comparison of the two,
>or pros and cons/limitations I'd be very grateful.
>
>We currently use PLS indexing on about 5000 records, each with
>about 1k -> 7k worth of text. Speed is a priority.
>
>
>Ta lots,
>
>
>Wd.
Received on Fri May 15 1998 - 00:00:00 CDT