Zend Lucene & Symfony: One big index vs several multiple indexes

Question

I'm working on a new design in symfony that includes a large amount of tables most of them related.

Following symfony tutorials, and doing some research on the web made me decide on Zend lucene index to provide search features.

I'd like to be able to search across multiple tables but be able to distinguish the results in order to call the appropiate module actions when displaying search results.

I'd appreciate if you could give me some opinions on having a big index containing diverse information in the index documents (and possibly including a filed indicating which model it corresponds to) vs having a separte index for each table with a more homogeneous index document structure.

Thanks a lot and sorry for my english.

Answer 1

In general, you probably want to include everything you'd search for together in one index. It will be easier and there will probably be little performance difference anyway.

The major problem with a big index is just that you have to do some handling every time the index changes, so if you really have disjoint data then you lose some performance if you're rewarming for unneeded changes.

But it's unlikely this will have a remarkable impact for you.