Advanced Search Engine

The Advanced Search Engine makes use of full-text indexing to allow greatly enhanced performance of general text queries.

Conventional database indexes do not index individual words within text fields. This means that if a user searches for an individual word the database has to scan every string in the entire database where that word might occur. As the size of the database increases this becomes slower and slower to the point where it becomes impractical.

Full-text indexing maintains indexes on each individual word in all text fields in the database, so that the database can go straight to the clips which contain a given word or words. This can speed free text searching up by orders of magnitude on larger databases.

Furthermore the text index itself can be used to provide hints to the user as to what strings to search for, allowing as-you-type search suggestions to be provided.

Setting up Full-Text Indexing

To enable full-text indexing you must have a valid Pegasus Server licence. You also need to enable the feature by entering the following text into the ‘Other’ field in the Server Config screen in the CatDV Server Control Panel:

catdv.fullTextIndexing = true

You will then need to shut down CatDV Server.

Assuming this is an existing installation with data already loaded in the database then you need to build an initial full-text index. This is done in the CatDV Server Control Panel by selecting ‘Rebuild Text Index..’ from the Tools menu. Building the initial index can take some time depending on the size of the database and CatDV Server must remain shut down during this time.

Once the index has been built you can start CatDV Server and full text indexing will be enabled.

NOTE: Full text indexing only affects free text searches such as using the simple search box in the web interface or when performing a fuzzy search on all log and media fields from the desktop client.

NOTE: Searches against individual fields continue to use normal database indexes. This means searches for ‘equals’ or ‘starts with’ are much faster than searches for ‘contains’ or ‘ends with’.

Search Hints

Search hints provide as-you-type hints to the words or phrases that a user might want to search for using knowledge of the words and phrases that are actually present in the database.

Currently search hints are only implemented in the CatDV Web 2 interface.