Index Engines: The Other Extreme

• From fully normalized structure to no structure at all

• "Database" only stores the index, not the data. Data is usually stored in a possibly distributed file system.

• Markup is what gets in the way of the content.

• Great for full text search

• The only technology proven to work at the size of the Web (not just a web site but the entire Web)

• Examples:

  • Lucene

  • Fast

  • Google

• Is there anything in between all structure (relational) and no structure (index engines)?