Fast vs Sharepoint Search

Question

Hi we are designing a sharepoint site . The back drop is that we have a huge a document library (with half a mill documents) . Also blogs . what we want is a (optimum ) search that can search through all the content (Document library / Blogs etc) . So whats the best approach to do this ?   


These are the specific questions in front of us .

1.       A comparison of the features of MOSS search inbuilt in MOSS 2007 and FAST search based on the following points and others that you feel are important.

a.       Federated Search

b.      Sub second response times

c.       Indexing speed

d.      Indexing accuracy and incremental indexing

e.      Results trimming based on access

2.       Features of SPS 2010 and integration with FAST

a.       Availability of FAST search as an integral element of SPS 2010.

Answer 1

The amount of documents is no problem for either MOSS Search or FAST.

1.

a) Federation is against another repository and is handled by the webparts, not the search engine. What kind of federation do you need?

b) Sub second response must be considered with regards to your hardware and how many queries you execute simultaneous. If you run local fast disks in a RAID configuration, and you have plenty of RAM, you should be well off. No search engine likes to live in VMWare and on a SAN.

c) About the same for both in my experience. It also depends on what sources you are indexing. If you have more hardware (cpu's, boxes), then FAST can process several documents in parallel during indexing.

d) What do you mean by accuracy? And most crawlers support incremental indexing for both systems.

e) Built-in for both. "Old" FAST has a security module hooked up to Active Directory and FAST for SharePoint 2010 handles it thru SharePoint. (This is true for items indexed with windows security, and as long as SharePoint is your source you're well off in that department)

2.

a) FAST for SharePoint is fairly well integrated on the admin side and with PowerShell scripts. And the indexing is happening via your Search Application set up in SharePoint. The license portion of it is available out there :)

What you get with FAST is a much more scalable solution in terms of amount of data and handling system load. FAST scales very well on more hardware for load balancing and replication. You also get modules for entity extraction (concepts) which can be useful. For example names and places.

FAST also has better language support. They can do lemmatization, which can expand your query to other forms of the words you are searching for. You also get a much more powerful query language (fql) where you can do boosts on different fields and values. One scenario could be to boost powerpoint files for people in the marketing dept.

Depending on your needs and what features you could try out the built-in search first and see if it fits your need. If not, then start looking at FAST.

Answer 2

Hi Mikael,

  Thanks for the reply. I have a question on some basic things such as different between FAST ESP and FAST search engine for Sharepoint as well as using FAST serach engine without touching Sharepoint related stuffs. We have the following requirement.

FAST will be used to serach content from multiple sources such as Oracle UCM/Stellant Content server, Oracle Database, Oracle WebCenter Portal related to discussions, blogs etc.

Please advice on if you have any idea on how to go for the above requirement. Also we need to have the FAST search to be called from WebCenter Portal. Is it recommended to use the FAST Query web service or FAST ESP Jave based APIs ? Also how to handle the security in FAST since we need to use Oracle specific directory service to retrieve the user information. There will be no requirement to use the Windows based security modules. So, I am looking for more Out-of-boxes security support for FAST so that we can use non-windows based LDAP, or active directories for autentication.

  

Answer 3

Hi,

You could use either BCS to connect to the Oracle DB's or use the FAST database connector. If you require security trimming you might want to look into a third party connector. Security with FAST and SharePoint is easiest if you use windows based auth, but it is supported to use others as well and there are sparse documentation around this on TechNet.

As for executing searches in FAST/SharePoint from an external portal your only real option is to use the SharePoint query web service, so this is recommended. The java based API's are not available in FAST Search for SharePoint, only with FAST ESP.

For you scenario FAST ESP (FSIS/FSIA) might be the better choice but it's not for sale anymore ;)

Regards,
Mikael Svenson

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Search Enthusiast - SharePoint MVP/WCF4/ASP.Net4
http://techmikael.blogspot.com/