msa@clinet.UUCP (10/01/87)
In article <4031@well.UUCP> nightjob@well.UUCP (Hank Roberts writes: > >This site has been investigating a full text retrieval database product >called BRS/SEARCH from BRS Information Technologies in New York; ... >... asked me to see if I could get any comments on the product. ... I'm also interested in comparisons between different products offering full text retrieval. About a year ago I attempted to find a suitable product by reading brochures and other similar material. The target machine was VAX/VMS. I had to resort to comparing what kind of things you could do with them, like can you search words beginning, ending or even with complicated pattern. Can you search consecutive words, words in same sentence, paragraph, etc. Can you build search sets and combine them with boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) to form new sets. I read brochures of BRS/SEARCH, STATUS, BASIS and some Scandinavian products, like Polydoc, NOTIS-IR and TRIP/TDBS. BRS/SEARCH and TRIP/TDBS had clearly almost everything you could think of. TRIP/TDBS boasted with the clear separation of the actual database and user interface, which I consider important. I also like the idea of giving a logical structure to the archived document (like: headline, ingress, body text and any other required fields like numbers, dates etc.) For testing purposes I set up various kinds databases. Among others: USENET 20-30Mb of *unsorted* material (blew up the thing, in the first attempt -- didn't much like the UUENCODED and some other funny messages. This slight omission was promptly corrected by Paralog-- after that it ate everything :-). STTFNB for 2 1/2 months time we received everything from from the Finnish News Agency (STT-FNB) and archived it. The total amount of archived text was about 25Mb. With indexes the required disk space is 75Mb (3 times the raw text -- mainly because of Finnish, I suspect). (This was the main test) Excluding minor bugs in user interface (in forms input & design), it has worked according to the manuals. I'm pretty satisfied with it, but as I have no "hands on" experience of the other products, I would be interested to hear other opinions. Any other users/testers of TRIP/TDBS (descendant of 3RIP)? Any hands on comparisons with BRS/SEARCH or BASIS? Is there any suitable "benchmarks" that I could try on our system? Note: I cannot send/reply with direct/private mail from this host (clinet) -- I can post news (obviously :-) -- Markku Savela, msa@clinet.FI Nokia Information Systems, P.O. BOX 780, SF-00101 Helsinki, Finland