Re: Feasibility of LARGE text database

In article <CM297s.8K1_at_news.cis.umn.edu>, rediske_at_lenti.med.umn.edu (Ryan Rediske (BioMed Lib)) wrote:

> Hi all,
> I'm a curious student employee of the U of MN. We run expensive
> database software to search medical journals (MEDLINE). As the subject
> states, it is very large (6-7 Gigabytes!). I know nothing of Oracle,
> other than it is a database system. Could we save our department tens of
> thousands of dollars by using our site license for the database file to
> make our own front-end and an Oracle based database? Is it possible
> considering the frequency of users (estimated 2,000+ login's a day, not to
> mention several queries per login)? We have a SunSparc10 model 51 with
> one processor, 128 Megs RAM and 9.4 Gigs of drives.

Not really.

You obviously could store the documents in the db, and use the db to distribute them, but with 6-7 GB you need content based retrieval. Oracle has a text search product, and from what I've seen it works well; but, it ain't cheap. Considering the cost of application development & deployment, I doubt it would pay off.

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