Re: Could use some advice on search architecture

On 4/18/2014 8:59 AM, Ron Pasch wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm contemplating what architecture I should use to make searching as
> fast as possible given the information available and the search
> requirements. Let me give some background first;
>
> - The database contains products of can potentially have a lot of them
> (up to about 3 to 5 million)
> - Each product has about 30 different properties defined about them.
> Things like what color they are etc. All these properties are enumerated
> choices, so for instance for color there is a list of available static
> never changing options of which one can be chosen for that product. This
> is the same for all those 30 properties. Currently they are stored as
> enumerated types (CREATE TYPE propertyvalue AS ENUM ('option1',
> 'option2', etc..)
> - It should be possible to search for products and provide properties
> that the product SHOULD have, not must have. For instance, for color,
> the search could specify that it should return products that are either
> red, blue or green.
> - The products that match with the most properties should be in the top
> of the search results
> - If different products match with the same amount of properties, the
> ordering should then be on the product that is most popular. There is
> information in the database (and if need be also in the same table)
> about how many times a product is sold.
> - The results will be paginated per 15 products
>
> The requirement is that these searches should be as fast as possible,
> with a maximum of about 200 ms time taken for a search query.
>
> What would be the best approach to this if I were to do this in the
> database only? Should/can this be done with postgresql only or should I
> look into other types of technology? (Lucene? Sphinx? others?)
>
> Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thx in advance!
>
> Ron
>
>
>

As we are PG users, on a PG list, we are gonna recommend PG, obviously. :-)

Actually though, I recommend PG.

> - The products that match with the most properties should be in the top
> of the search results

That kinda query is going to be really difficult, I think, regardless of
what you use. To find that you'll have to measure every product (all 5
million) and then sort the results.

> enumerated types (CREATE TYPE propertyvalue AS ENUM ('option1',
> 'option2', etc..)

So, you have something like:

CREATE TYPE colortype AS ENUM ('red', 'green', 'blue');
CREATE TYPE sizetype AS ENUM ('small', 'medium', 'large');

create table product
(
id serial,
name text,
color colortype,
size sizetype,
...
);

I assume the problem is you don't want to index all 30 properties? That
makes sense.

> - It should be possible to search for products and provide properties
> that the product SHOULD have, not must have.

I don't understand this. Say you have a sprocket in red and green. Do
you want to search for:

select * from product where name = 'sprocket' and (color = 'red' or
color = 'green')

Or do you want something else? Does the user say they'd "prefer" blue,
but will take whatever else you have?

Do you search for some properties exactly and some "preferred"?

Perhaps you could describe a little more how you want to query the
database? Or, maybe, what your user's are searching for?

-Andy