A Study on the DB-IR Integration: Per-Document Basis Online Index Maintenance

While database(DB) and information retrieval(IR) have been developed independently, there have been emerging requirements that both data management and efficient text retrieval should be supported simultaneously in an information system such as health care, customer support, XML data management, and digital libraries. The great divide between DB and IR has caused different manners in index maintenance for newly arriving documents. While DB has extended its SQL layer to cope with text fields due to lack of intact mechanism to build IR-like index, IR usually treats a block of new documents as a logical unit of index maintenance since it has no concept of integrity constraint. However, In the DB-IR integrations, a transaction on adding or updating a document should include maintenance of the posting lists accompanied by the document. Although DB-IR integration has been budded in the research filed, the issue will remain difficult and rewarding areas for a while. One of the primary reasons is lack of efficient online transactional index maintenance. In this paper, performance of a few strategies for per-document basis transactional index maintenance - direct index update, pulsing auxiliary index and posting segmentation index - will be evaluated. The result shows that the pulsing auxiliary strategy and posting segmentation indexing scheme, can be a challenging candidates for text field indexing in DB-IR integration.