[rt-users] Upgrade and migration questions

[Kenneth Marshall]

On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 02:45:52PM +0000, Dominic Hargreaves wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 02:12:34PM -0600, Kenneth Marshall wrote:
> 
> > Moving from PostgreSQL -> MySQL will need a little bit more work.
> > I think that there is a wiki article and possibly some tools to
> > help with this process. I do have a question for you. Why are you
> > moving from PostgreSQL to MySQL instead of updating to the current
> > PostgreSQL release? For one thing, PostgreSQL will allow you to
> > use full text indexing to dramatically improve the performance of
> > full content searching within your tickets and RTFM articles.
> > This functionality is also available with the Oracle backend. Is
> > there some problem you are trying to address?
> 
> Just to note that I assume you're talking about 
> <http://wiki.bestpractical.com/view/PostgreSQLFullText> which isn't
> a standard part of RT yet; I wondered for a while after reading your
> message whether I'd missed something!
> 
> It's a shame that the API for SearchBuilder isn't such that you can
> configure to treat certain columns as full-text-searchable ones rather
> than have to manually hack it in; makes deployment a little more
> fiddly.
> 
> But thanks for mentioning it because I didn't realise that this work
> had been done and it's something we're interested in!
> 
> -- 
> Dominic Hargreaves, Systems Development and Support Team
> Computing Services, University of Oxford

Hi Dominic,

Yes, that is patch. I actually wrote it based on the Oracle
patch that is also in the wiki. If you take a look, the patch
is almost ridiculously simply and changes next to nothing in
the code because I could leverage the fact that creating a
full text search query cleaned up the strings without the need
to do it in the RT code base. We run it here and it is worth
its weight in gold the first time several users issue a fulltext
search simultaneously on anything but the smallest database. I
suspect that it is not in the default RT because it is not
globally available on all backends. To support that, they would
need to stitch in some other search engine to support those
functions -- a much, much more complicated option both in lines
of code to write and support. As far as "fiddly" goes, many
other pieces of a base RT install were way more so than the
full text search piece. :)

Regards,
Ken