FAST ESP : Term Descriptions

Question :

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Do you have a quick reference sheet for the terms associated with indexing and related concepts such as: Search Clusters, Search Columns, Search Rows

ANSWER
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This reference is found in the FAST Data Search 3.2 Configuration Guide.

A Data Search installation may consist of a number of Search Engines. A Search Engine provides indexing and search features towards a given partition of the total searchable content. The Search Engines are grouped in Search Clusters, Search Columns and Search Rows.

A Search Cluster is a group of Search Engines that share the same Index Profile (schema). This means that the collections assigned to this cluster may be mapped to the same index layout. One Search Cluster may for instance contain web pages and documents, while another Search Cluster may contain items from a content database.

The cluster may include multiple Search Rows (query rate scaling) and Search Columns (data volume scaling) that share the same index configuration. The matrix in the figure above indicates this.

Each Search Cluster will have a number of Collections assigned to it,which provides a logical grouping of content. Note that the collection concept represents a logical grouping of the content within the Search Cluster (one collection resides inside one
Search Cluster, but may be spread across multiple Search Columns).

The Document Processing is performed prior to indexing. Within the document processing each document is represented by a set of Elements, which can be further processed and later mapped to searchable Fields via the Index Profile. Elements and Fields may represent content parts and attributes related to the document (body,
title, heading, URI, author, category).

The Index Profile defines the layout/schema of the searchable index, and defines how fields are to be treated by query and result processing. Each Search Cluster has an associated Index Profile.

The Index Profile also includes one or more Result Views that defines alternative ways for a query front-end to view the index with respect to queries.