advanced searching mongodb using mongomapper, sunspot/solr or sphinx?

I have am using mongodb with mongomapper to store all my products. Each product belongs to multiple categories that have many levels i.e. category, sub category etc. Each product has many search fields that are embedded documents in product.

All this is working and I now want to add search to the app.

开发者_高级运维The search system needs text search: multiple, dynamic, faceted search including min/max range search.

I have been looking into sunspot gem but having difficulty setting it up on dev let alone trying to run it in production! And I have also looked at sphinx.

But I am wondering if using just mongomapper / mongodb will be quick enough and the best way, as its quite a complex search system ?

Any help / suggestions / experiences / tutorials and examples on this would be most appreciated.

Thanks a lot,

Rick

I've been involved with a very large Sphinx powered search and I think its awful. Very difficult to configure if you want anything past a very simple full-text search. Solr\Lucene, on the other hand, is incredibly flexible and was unbelievably easier to setup and get running.

I am not using Solr in conjunction with MongoDB to power full text search with all the extra goodies, like facets, etc. Depending on how you configure Solr, you may not need to even hit your MongoDB for data. Or, you may tell Solr to index fields, but not to store them and instead you just store the ObjectId's that correspond to data inside of MongoDB.

If your search truly is a complex search system, I very strongly recommend that you do not use MongoDB for search and go with Solr. One big reason is that MongoDb doesnt have a full text feature - instead, it has regular expression matches. The Regex matches work wonderfully but will only use indexes in certain cases.