Personally, I'm not too afraid of having an FTS engine outside the database.
Oracle's Intermedia, which has a very powerful/fast FTS engine, uses that
approach.
I could look into how they do the SQL integration, maybe it would yeld some
ideas.
Mark, about that row identifier: OID's are no good for fast find. Maybe you
could use tuple id (TID). But please note that tuple ID's change after a
simple update. It's like the offset of the row inside the table file (and
therefore blazing fast to get to that row again).
One possible idea for SQL integration: can one use index access-method
functions to query the FTS outside the database? Yes, it would require some
work, but the results I guess it would be wonderful. Ok, Tom, not so fast as
an index sitting inside Postgres, but AFAICS that's not going to happen
anytime soon.
Yours sincerely,
Edmar Wiggers
BRASMAP Information Systems
+55 48 9960 2752