Storing books in a database

Question

I want to create a system that stores books (and some other documents). Users will be able to log into the system where they can either see a list of all books or enter some search string and get a list of the books containing the search string. My problem is that I don´t know how I should go about storing my books. The books obv have to be searchable and the search needs to return the books ID, Name, and preferable page. Anything more like the text surrounding the search term would be a nice extra.

Some facts that might help you help me get the best answer.

• The database does not have to be free. If SQL Server or an Oracle DB will help me than I´m all for that.
• The books will be about ~100 (2-600 pages)
• The documents will be about ~1000 (10-50 pages)
• Adding books and documents will be a slow process that will happen infrequently so any type of re-indexing of tables does not need to be fast.
• I have not decided how to search the documents. I do need my search results to be ranked based on relevance somehow. This might become a source of another question in the future

Answer 1

Do not use a RDBMS database. RDBMS are good for storing relational data. Data you are trying to store are a set of documents. Use a document store like couchDB or mongoDB. However, you since have to search this data, it is better to index this data in lucene which is built for such needs