Setting Compass Search for the first time
You need to setup and create a Compass Search “search instance” for your user database.
About this task
Compass Search Definitions and Best Practices
A Compass Search is a “search instance” for a Compass search database. This means, if you have more than one Compass user database, regardless to which Compass database set it belongs and you want to enable search for said user database, you will need to setup and create a Compass Search “search instance” for said user database. A Compass Search “search instance” will be uniquely. The uniqueness is made off the Compass database set and user name. Thus, if your database set name is “Demo” and user database name is “SAMPL”, then the unique name for this search instance is “Demo_SAMPL”.
A search instance is created at the “home” location that you chose. It is recommended that you use the same “home” for all of your search instances. This way, all of your search data are in a common location on the file system.
To ease with maintains and upgrades, a dedicated server should be used for Compass Search. This way, if the OS has to be patched or Compass has to be upgraded, they can be done without having to bring down all of Compass at the same time.
Compass Search System Requirement
Compass Search, just like with any other search engine, is disk bound more than CPU or RAM. This is because searching and especially indexing generates a lot of disk activates. To that end, having a decent fast disk is essential for search. Furthermore, having a dedicated disk for the index, instead of the OS disk, means disk activates, on which the index lives, is now dedicated to search out of the OS or other applications’ way.
Attention: Using NFS drive for the index is problematic and should be avoided. If you must use it, make sure it is based on NFSv4.
- The number of record types and fields enabled for search. If you are indexing a small subset of your record type and fields in those record types, then the index will be smaller.
- The overall data size in your record types and fields enabled for search. If your indexed records contain a lot of data, then the index will be larger.
- The number of unique words in your data of the record types and fields enabled for search. If your data contains a lot of unique words outside the standard English words, then the index will be larger.
In general, if all record types and fields are enabled for search, it should be assumed that the index size will be 1/4 of the database size (excluding attachments if they are stored in the database).
CPU and RAM requirement for Compass Search is light. A decent CPU and 4 GB of real RAM per user database enabled for search should be sufficient.
Compass Search can be installed on Windows or Linux OS and the machine can be a VM.
Note: It is recommended that Compass Search be installed on a separate machine than the Compass server. Doing so means the search server can be managed and upgraded independently from Compass server.
Setting Compass Search for the first time
Setting up Compass Search requires some preparation. Based on your schema and organization needs, one of the main decisions you will have to make is determine which record types and fields of those record types to enable for search. In general, you will enable search on all of your records and their fields. However, there may be cases where you do not want some record types or their fields searchable. This maybe because you have record types and fields that do not add value to search results.
The process to setup Compass Search is the same as what was outlined earlier in “A quick introduction to Compass Search”. This section will follow the same steps but provide additional details.