Hi All, I have successfully used Lucene in the "tradtiional" way to provide full-text search for various websites. Now I am tasked with developing a data-store to back a web crawler. The crawler can be configured to retrieve arbitrary fields from arbitrary pages, so the result is that each document may have a random assortment of fields. It seems like Lucene may be a natural fit for this scenario since you can obviously add arbitrary fields to each document and you can store the actually data in the database. I've done some research to make sure that it would meet all of our individual requirements (that we can iterate over documents, update (delete/replace) documents, etc.) and everything looks good. I've also seen a couple of references around the net to other people trying similar things... however, I know it's not meant to be used this way, so I thought I would post here and ask for guidance? Has anyone done something similar? Is there any specific reason to think this is a bad idea?
The one thing that I am least certain about his how well it will scale. We may reach the point where we have tens of millions of documents and a high percentage of those documents may be relatively large (10k-50k each). We actually would NOT be expecting/needing Lucene's normal extreme fast text search times for this, but we would need reasonable times for adding new documents to the index, retrieving documents by ID (for iterating over all documents), optimizing the index after a series of changes, etc. Any advice/input/theories anyone can contribute would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, - John
