Thursday, September 4, 2008

FAST ESP 4.3.x : Delete Indexed Documents

QUESTION:

I have several collections that I would like to re-crawl from scratch, but I don't want to have to reconfigure all the settings for each. In FDS 3.x, is there a way to delete all crawled data without losing the collection configurations?


ANSWER:

Here are the steps required for deleting all crawled data and the index from a 3.2 installation without removing the crawler configuration:

IMPORTANT - This will cause complete loss of all indexed documents,
therefore, search will be unavailable for some time until the crawler has begun re-populating the collections. We strongly recommend initiating this procedure during a system maintenance window.

1. Stop FDS from the Admin GUI or using the command 'net stop FASTDSService'

2. Ensure all FAST processes have had time to stop completely and manually kill any remaining processes with the Task Manager

3. Delete all files and directories within the %FASTSEARCH%\data\directory, EXCEPT %FASTSEARCH%\data\crawler\run\domainspec (this file contains the crawler collection configurations)

4. Start FDS with the command 'net start FASTDSService'

5. Once all FDS processes are active in the System Management page, open up the collection configuration for each collection, verify that the settings are still correct and then click 'submit' on each to refresh the collection information.


NOTES:


-You may see temporary OSErrors for the PostProcessor trying to locate the collections directory (which will be in the process of being rebuilt).

- You may also see temporary errors from the QRServer, such as 'All partitions down', because the index is still being rebuilt.

- Some collections may start immediately crawling, while others may be idle for a short time before they start crawling.