Advanced search engine or server for relational database In my current project we are storing big volume of data in relational database. One of the recent key requirements is to enrich application by adding some advanced search capabilities.

In the Project performance is one of important factors due to very large tables (10+ milions of records) with parent-children relations (for example: multi-level parent-child relationship, where I am looking for all parents with specific children). The search engine should also be able to check these references for hits.

I have found some potential engines on stack overflow, however it looks like that all of them are dedicated rather for text search than relational db and hosted on linux os:

Lucine
Solr
Sphinx


As I understand some of them use documents as a source of searching, but is it possible/ efficient to create programmaticaly documents based on my relational data? As I am not familiar with all of their features/capabilities can anyone please make some recommendations or propose some different solution?

To summarize my requirements:


framework/engine to search relational database including decendants.
support for Microsoft SQL Server
can be used in .NET applications
preferably hosted on Windows systems


Does any of mentioned above are able to solve my problem? do you know any better solution?
Stack Overflow search is now 81% less crappy, thanks to Lucene. Whether this, or any of the other document oriented search servers, would be a good fit is difficult to tell from the detail you've posted.

Lucene/Solr and their ilk are built to search textual data. It sounds like you should be considering a graph database. High Scalability has an interesting article on Neo4j which discusses some of the concepts well.