Comparison of full-text search performance in relational and non-relational database systems

Abstract

In text retrieval, full-text search refers to techniques for searching a single computer stored document or a collection in a database. In a full-text search, a search engine examines all the words in every stored document as it tries to match search criteria. Full-text search queries, while been executed in several types of database systems, perform linguistic searches against text data, by operating on words and phrases based on particular rules. Full-text search queries can include simple words and phrases or multiple forms of a word or phrase and return any documents that contain at least one match. In this work, we aim to compare and report the performance between relational and non-relational database systems in text retrieval, and more specifically in full-text search. This comparative study is focused on the characteristics of some of the most popular database management systems, regarding the overall performance when querying text documents. We also pose and highlight the features, the technical specifications and the differences of the database systems, through several comparative tests and theoretical exploration.