Searching without SQL: Re-engineering a database-centric web application with open-source information retrieval software

This paper seeks to describe the process by which a database-centric web application was redesigned and rewritten to take advantage of Apache's Lucene - an open-source information retrieval software library written in the Java programming language. After the implementation of a Lucene-based text index of "semi-structured data", a college radio station's card catalog application was able to deliver higher-quality search results in significantly less time than it was able to do using just a relational database alone. Additionally, the dramatic improvements in speed and performance even allowed the search results interface to be redesigned and enhanced with an improved pagination system and new features such as faceted search/filtering