Future plans for the different search engines

[TPBVoortman]

Hi, the Corax search engine was introduced in ravendb 6. Are there plans to face out Lucene at some point? If that's not the case will new features still be added to the Lucene search engine implementation? I noticed that new vector feature as exclusive to the Corax engine. And are there any plans for complex properties to be supported in the Corax engine?

[ayende]

New features are going to be Corax, mostly.
Lucene is going to be supported as an indexing engine for the full 7.x and at least the 8.x versions. So a minimum of 5 - 6 years from now.

Complex properties are currently indexed as flat JSON on Lucene. That is actually not an intended feature, and something that you can do in Corax if you call ToString() on the object.

What exactly are you trying to do?

[TPBVoortman]

We are currently in the process of upgrading a project from Ravendb 5 to Ravendb 7 and I wanted to maybe update a few old indexes to the Corax engine

[ayende]

Would love to hear your feedback on the process and the changes. In general, you should just notice things being faster.

[TPBVoortman]

The process of upgrading to ravendb has been straight forward and somewhat simple. We only encountered two hurdles while upgrading.

One of them was that a lot of Ravendb's publicly exposed classes became sealed which broke a few things we had built on them. Things like the DynamicBlittableJson the we expanded upon in places like the additional sources of an index.

The other was that I noticed that there Ravendb throws up a lot of not well documented hurdles when you’re migrating from Ravendb 5 to 7 with a community license or without a license. Things like:

• Index will automatically be set to Corax if you import a Ravendb 5 database into 7 event though they were explicit set to Lucine indexes in Ravendb 5. It can be fixed by updating the default index engine on the database or server level, but it still took us a bit to vigour this out
• The embedded server that is used by the Ravendb test driver will fail with a generic error by default because it doesn't have a license by default. Unit tests using the ravendb 7 RavenDB.TestDriver #20277
• If you create a database using code and enable document expiration then it will fail by default if you don't also set the DeleteFrequencyInSec because for some reason it doesn't use the default value and/or default server value. But you have to manual set the value to 129600 which is the default for these environments

I know it's a bit of a nitpick bit I also am not a fan of the new default layout of the main dashboard. There used to be a block with all the databases which you could easily click to immediately go into the document overview of a database. Now you have to click on the databases on the left side and then the database or on the database dropdown on top, then the database and then documents. Which in both cases is at least 1 extra click. And if you have a lot of databases then you will also have to scroll a lot more in both cases. Which makes navigating the UI take more time. I also don't like that you can't open the database specific navigation on the left in a new tab by clicking the scroll wheel or using the right click dropdown. I know that the last one has always been in Ravendb studio but I still find it a bit annoying

[ppekrol]

Thanks @TPBVoortman for feedback, I've created few issues so we can take a peek and enhance the experience.

May I ask you for what you are using DynamicBlittableJson? I'm a bit shocked that you need it for something. We sealed some of the classes for performance reasons, also some of them were marked as internal.

[TPBVoortman]

We had added variables/references to the json that was stored in documents. Something similar to json schema references. On the client side we had a custom serializer to convert the data to the correct formats. To convert/use the data in the index we added a class that extended DynamicBlittableJson that handled the extra bit of logic for converting the json.