Date: Mon, 30 Mar 1998 17:20:33 -0500 (EST) From: John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu> To: Simon Shapiro <shimon@simon-shapiro.org> Cc: freebsd-database@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: RE: Mail indexing infrastructure Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980330164024.8294C-100000@fallout.campusview.indiana.edu> In-Reply-To: <XFMail.980330133652.shimon@simon-shapiro.org>
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On Mon, 30 Mar 1998, Simon Shapiro wrote: > > The current indexed archive goes back to 1994. > > This is not an answer to my question :-) Currently we are keeping 4 years. > Do we want to keep 40? 10? 5? Some (theoretical) limit has to be put. Oh, I would say indefinately until there is a compelling reason to dump some. The more we have, however, the more essential date scoping becomes. I think it is already becoming a bit of a problem. > If thread retrieval is based on Subject: line, an RDBMS is a trivially good > solution. One can even apply regex to the subject, limit dates, etc. Good thread indexing is based on subjects, message-ids, dates and content. Quick-and-dirty thread retrieval is an easy RDBMS problem, good thread retrieval is rather more complex. For a nice summary outline of threading methods and their performance, see: Lewis, David; Knowles, Kimberly (1997). Theading Electronic Mail: A Preliminary Study. Information Processing & Management, 33(2):209-217. > If the current system is good and should only be augmented, > rather than replaced, this is fine by me. Let me re-phrase: most proposals to date do replacement without preservation of what is good with the current system. A wholesale replacement WITH preservation of what is good would be most welcome. I'd be the first to jump up and down with glee to find a viable alternative to freeWAIS for doing full text searches with stemming, soundex matching, automatic term weighting etc... freeWAIS is is a festering heap of bugs, but it is the best the free software world has. Postgres with a module offering similar functionality would make me one happy camper. -john To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-database" in the body of the message
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