DBSight: More Grief for the Commercial RDBMS Dinosaurs
October 25, 2010
On a phone call last week, the participants were annoyed at the baked in enterprise database. Each upgrade cycle, several of the participants reported that their companies just “paid the bill.” Habit, not critical thinking, keeps some of those giant IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle RDBMS installations pump cash from clients into the corporate coffers.
I learned that DBSight is now at Version 4.x (a J2EE search platform) on the call. I first wrote about the system in April 2008 in “DBSight Search: Worth a Closer Look”. The system offers full text search for information stuffed into relational databases. The system can integrate with other languages via XML, JSON, and HTML. The description was that DBSight included a built in database crawler. The system provided a number of knobs and dials. I noted down such functions as faceted search, support for word lists, multi-threaded searching, and some other goodies. In order to handle big data, the system supports multiple indexes and sharded search as well as a number of other speed up methods.
The company coding DBSight has been around since 2004. DBSight has been engineered as a “re-usable search platform.” License fees begin at about $200 but there is a community edition available from this page. If you want an enterprise license, DBSight will provide a custom price quote. I did some poking around and located a link for a free download at http://www.dbsight.net/index.php?q=node/47.
Could an enterprising coder combine some other bits and pieces and create a system that delivers some of the Blue Stream or MarkLogic functionality?
Stephen E Arnold, October 25, 2010
Freebie