Lucene.NET + Azure + AzureDirectory or something else?

Question

Good morning.

I am currently working on a project which was originally going to be hosted on a physical server with SQL2k8R2, but it looks like we are moving towards the cloud and Azure... Since SQL Azure does not currently support Full Text Indexing, i have been looking at Lucene.NET with the AzureDirectory project for back end storage. The way this will work is that updates will come in and be queued. once processed, they will be placed in a ToIndex queue, which will kick off Lucene.NET indexing. I am just wondering if there would be a better way of doing this? We dont need to use Azure for this project, so if there is a better solution somewhere, please tell us... main requirement for hosting is it is in Europe...(Azure and Amazon Data centers in Dublin is handy, RackSpace in US is not so handy).

Thanks.

Answer 1

I haven't used that project, but it looks promising. From what I understand, the basic issue is that Lucene requires a file-system. I see 2 other possible solutions (basically just doing what the library does):

1. Use Azure Drive Storage and a worker role
2. Use Drive storage, but use a VM (if there are config issues with using a worker role)

http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9710117

SQLite also has full text search available, but it has the same basic issue - it requires a filesystem: http://www.sqlite.org/fts3.html