Enabling full-text search on production databases

Planning is critical to ensuring a successful full-text search deployment.

Before you begin

The time it will take to complete this scenario depends on the complexity of your HCL Compass schema and the policies of your organization. After you issue the cqtsadmin.pl command with the setup_cq_fts option to complete the full-text search deployment, it can take a few hours to a few days for the command to complete, depending on the size and number of records in your user database. While the batch-mode indexing is running, full-text search is enabled and available to HCL Compass Web client users. However, search results will be partial until the indexing process completes.

About this task

This scenario is nearly the same as the previous scenario, Enabling full-text search on the SAMPL database, with the addition of predeployment planning and post-deployment tasks.

Planning your deployment

Procedure

  1. Ensure that you have enough free disk space on the drive where you plan to install the full-text search index, which you specify by using the ftshome option to the cqtsadmin.pl command. While there is no formula for calculating exactly how much free disk space you will need, following are some guidelines:
    • Double the index size when estimating the free disk space required to ensure sufficient space for index optimization. Here are some examples:
      • If your database has about one million records excluding stateless history records, then the index size will be approximately 3.5 GB. Therefore, you should plan to have at least 7 GB of free disk space.
      • If your database has about eight million records excluding stateless history records, then the index size will be approximately 8 GB. Therefore, you should plan to have at least 16 GB of free disk space.
    • As the number of records in your database increase, the full-text search index grows as well. However, the index grows at a much slower rate because its size is based on the number of words, their frequency and uniqueness.
  2. Begin deploying the full-text search feature at off-peak hours, for example, on the weekend. The first time you index your database, all the record types that you configured for full-text search are read. This activity might affect HCL Compass performance because of the high CPU usage and constant database reads. As with estimating the index size, there is no formula for calculating exactly how long the initial batch indexing will take. Following are some examples:
    • If your HCL Compass database has one million records excluding stateless history records, then expect the initial batch indexing to take from 1 to 1.5 days.
    • If your HCL Compass database has eight million records excluding stateless history records, then expect the intial batch indexing to take from 2 to 4 days.

Deployment and post-deployment tasks

Procedure

  1. Run the cqtsadmin.pl command with the init_cq_fts option to copy and set the default full-text search template and to generate the entity file.
  2. Edit the entity file, and select the record types and fields for searching and the display fields for the index hits.
  3. Run the cqtsadmin.pl command again with the setup_cq_fts option to complete the deployment.
  4. Review the D:\CQ.Search\dbset_userdb\AboutThisFTS.txt file. Then perform the following tasks:

    1. Using access control lists (ACLs), secure the password key file, D:\CQ.Search\TextSearch_SAMPL\key.txt, so that only administrators, the local system, and the Websphere Application Server service account for the full-text search feature can access the file.
    2. Secure the Solr administrative console to protect access to the full-text search service.
      Important: All HCL Compass Web servers and hosts must have access to the Solr search service. Any administrative host that needs to access the Solr administrative console must have access to the host where the full-text search profile resides. If you use HCL Compass MultiSite replication to share a host on which full-text search is deployed, then the remote HCL Compass Web server must have access to the host where the full-text search profile resides. The same access is needed in a load-balanced deployment.