10 Replies Latest reply: Apr 11, 2013 4:16 AM by Johannes Buverud

FTS in 7.6.04

Sam Morris Jan 30, 2012 2:00 PM

Greetings Everyone!

If you have an opinion, and a spare moment to express it, we're very interested on hearing anyone's war stories about using Full Text Search for the purpose of gaining some semblance of case insensitivity when doing searches in Remedy. We're using Oracle 11 as a store for our CMDB. As you know, if you search for Ron McDonald, and his name is in the People Form as Ron Mcdonald, it won't find him.

We're moving from 7.6.03 to 64 bit 7.6.04 (across the board - ARS, ITSM, and Atrium), and running on RHEL 5 Linux. To be honest, most of the people with whom I've ever spoke regarding FTS - including some folks who will remain nameless at BMC technical support - either didn't have much good to say about it, or just shuddered and turned and walked away. However we have a contractor who's going to help with the migration. He feels pretty strongly about the merits of FTS.

It's not that I distrust our helper - he's been most-impressive with all our interaction thus far. But due to the sheer number of people who seem to disagree with him, I thought I'd bounce this off of you brilliant, wonderful, outstanding, generous, always-willing-to-help members the collective, and possibly get some thoughts from folks who have implemented or tried to implement FTS, and learn of any horror stories (or all-out celebration and rejoicing) from the implementation of FTS in your system.

Thanks,

Sam

1. FTS in 7.6.04

David J. Easter Jan 30, 2012 2:22 PM (in response to Sam Morris)

FTS is the BMC recommended method for doing case-insensitive searches on a field within a single form. However, with the introduction of RKM and Global Search with ITSM, BMC has found that the multi-form search and broad adoption of FTS across the character fields within ITSM led to performance issues with the FTS engine. Thus, if you're implementing ITSM 7.6.0x / RKM 7.6.0x and require case-insensitive searches across the entire solution, there are knowledge articles that describe how to compensate for the performance issues encountered by utilizing the recent advances (and defect fixes) that Oracle has introduced around case-insensitivity in the DB itself.

Note that using the Oracle indexes rather than the BMC indexes will require some manual steps and overhead. For example, replacing the indexes will mandate additional work during an upgrade since BMC applications will expect the BMC provided indexes. BMC is investigating ways to make this more convenient in future releases.

So the bottom line is that it depends on what you are using it for. If searching within a single form on a limited number of fields, FTS is the way to go. If you're using the global search function within ITSM or RKM, then you can consider the built-in case-insensitivity capabilities of Oracle - but with the knowledge that it's a bit more work and you'll have to remember that you did it during your next upgrade.

Thanks,
--------------
David J. Easter
Product Line Manager
Remedy Platform
BMC Software, Inc.
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2. FTS in 7.6.04

Laurent Matheo Jan 31, 2012 4:23 PM (in response to David J. Easter)

We have a customer in 7.6.04 right now (no Sp) and indeed we ran into some performance issues:
ERROR 875 (Problem searching the index: IO Exception) and some problem finding / opening the index as well (load testing).

The support just provided us the FTS plugin (.jar) from 7.6.04 Sp2 that solves quite some issues and, as David said, some performances one. We'll test it and let you know if you're interested
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3. Re: FTS in 7.6.04

Sam Morris Feb 1, 2012 11:06 AM (in response to Laurent Matheo)

Hi Laurent,

Thank you for your input. Yes, we'd be very interested in any additional
comments or thoughts you may have after your testing.

Thanks,
Sam

-- Sam Morris
Systems Engineer
Union Pacific Railroad, Omaha NE
402-544-2443 (Office)
402-490-8775 (Cellular)
email: sam@up.com
-=>> Office hours are 6:00am - 3:00pm CDT Mon-Fri <<=-
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4. Re: FTS in 7.6.04

Jose Huerta Feb 2, 2012 12:58 AM (in response to Sam Morris)

May be out of topic, but if you are only intersested in case insensitive, may be this can help: http://theremedyforit.com/2011/12/case-insensitive-in-remedy/

Regards,

Jose Huerta
http://theremedyforit.com/
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5. FTS in 7.6.04

Laurent Matheo Feb 18, 2012 5:30 PM (in response to Sam Morris)

So far it seems the plugin is working better
It'll go to production next week hopefully.
Though as ARS 7.6.04 sp3 is out, perhaps we'll test its plugin if something goes wrong.

Sam Morris a écrit:

Hi Laurent,

Thank you for your input. Yes, we'd be very interested in any additional
comments or thoughts you may have after your testing.

Thanks,
Sam

-- Sam Morris
Systems Engineer
Union Pacific Railroad, Omaha NE
402-544-2443 (Office)
402-490-8775 (Cellular)
email: sam@up.com
-=>> Office hours are 6:00am - 3:00pm CDT Mon-Fri <<=-
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6. FTS in 7.6.04

Laurent Matheo Mar 6, 2012 2:23 AM (in response to Laurent Matheo)

Just to let you know, the plugin worked much better, still an error on some occasions (plugin dies), but it seems it's due to a special thing customer side, but it's already much better (stability side).
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7. Re: FTS in 7.6.04

Pascal Jeanne Jun 25, 2012 3:23 PM (in response to David J. Easter)

Hi David,

Could you help me fined the Knowledge articles you mention?

Also, are the "Oracle builtin" features the same ones that Jose refers to at "
http://theremedyforit.com/2011/12/case-insensitive-in-remedy/"?

Thanks.
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8. Re: FTS in 7.6.04

David J. Easter Jun 25, 2012 3:27 PM (in response to Pascal Jeanne)

There are several knowledge articles if you search for "case insensitive oracle" - but yes, they basically describe the same resolution that Jose's blog refers to.

Thanks,
---------------
David J. Easter
Product Line Manager, AR System
BSM & Atrium Solutions Mgmt
BMC Software, Inc.
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9. Re: FTS in 7.6.04

Jose Huerta Jun 25, 2012 3:34 PM (in response to David J. Easter)

I would add that my contribution at that post is to provide a SQL script to do it easy and without a high performance impact.

Regards,

Jose Huerta
http://theremedyforit.com/
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10. Re: FTS in 7.6.04

Johannes Buverud Apr 11, 2013 4:16 AM (in response to David J. Easter)

David J. Easter wrote:

FTS is the BMC recommended method for doing case-insensitive searches on a field within a single form. However, with the introduction of RKM and Global Search with ITSM, BMC has found that the multi-form search and broad adoption of FTS across the character fields within ITSM led to performance issues with the FTS engine. Thus, if you're implementing ITSM 7.6.0x / RKM 7.6.0x and require case-insensitive searches across the entire solution, there are knowledge articles that describe how to compensate for the performance issues encountered by utilizing the recent advances (and defect fixes) that Oracle has introduced around case-insensitivity in the DB itself.

Note that using the Oracle indexes rather than the BMC indexes will require some manual steps and overhead. For example, replacing the indexes will mandate additional work during an upgrade since BMC applications will expect the BMC provided indexes. BMC is investigating ways to make this more convenient in future releases.

So the bottom line is that it depends on what you are using it for. If searching within a single form on a limited number of fields, FTS is the way to go. If you're using the global search function within ITSM or RKM, then you can consider the built-in case-insensitivity capabilities of Oracle - but with the knowledge that it's a bit more work and you'll have to remember that you did it during your next upgrade.

Thanks,
--------------
David J. Easter
Product Line Manager
Remedy Platform
BMC Software, Inc.
Hi,
Is FTS and global search within ITSM or RKM still not a recomended combination on v7.6.04?
And how about v8?
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