ColumbuScout: towards building local search engines over large databases

In many database applications, search is still executed via form based query interfaces, which are then translated into SQL statements to find matching records. Ranking is usually not implemented unless users have explicitly indicated how to rank the matching records, e.g., in the ascending order of year. Often, this approach is neither intuitive nor user friendly (especially with many search fields in a query form). It also requires application developers to design schema-specific query forms and develop specific programs that understand these forms. In this work, we propose to demonstrate the ColumbuScout system that aims at quickly building and deploying a local search engine over one or more large databases. The ColumbuScout system adopts a search-engine-style approach for searches over local databases. It introduces its own indexing structures and storage designs, to improve its overall efficiency and scalability. We will demonstrate that it is simple for application developers to deploy ColumbuScout over any databases, and ColumbuScout is able to support search engine-like types of search over large databases efficiently and effectively.