ANN: NUCULAR fielded text searchable indexing

[aaron.watters]

ANNOUNCE:
NUCULAR fielded text searchable indexing

Nucular is a system for creating disk based full text indices
for fielded data. It can be accessed via a Python API
or via a suite of command line interfaces.

Nucular is intended to help store and retrieve
searchable information in a manner somewhat similar
to the way that "www.hotjobs.com" stores and
retrieves job descriptions, for example.

Nucular archives fielded documents and retrieves them
based on field value, field prefix, field word prefix,
or full text word prefix, or combinations of these.

Features:

-- Nucular is very light weight. Updates and accesses
do not require any server process or other system
support such as shared memory locking.

-- Nucular supports concurrency. Arbitrary concurrent
updates and accesses by multiple processes or threads
are supported, with no possible locking issues.

-- Nucular indexes and retrieves large collections quickly.

Read more and download at:
http://nucular.sourceforge.net

Online demos:

http://www.xfeedme.com/nucular/gut.py/go
http://www.xfeedme.com/nucular/mondial.py/go

I hope you like!
-- Aaron Watters

===
I don't know ka-RAH-tee
But I know ka-RAY-zee
-- James Browne

 

[aaron.watters]

Does "NUCULAR" stand for anything? The (apparent) misspelling of
"nuclear" has already turned me off wanting to find out more about it.

Tim Delaney

No, it doesn't stand for anything. I guess it's not for you .
Sorry about that.

(see the graphic at the bottom of http://nucular.sourceforge.net)

-- Aaron Watters

===
An apple every 8 hours will keep 3 doctors away. (kliban)

 

[Istvan Albert]

No, it doesn't stand for anything.

It also reminds me of someone we all know, and I wish it didn't.

As the latin proverb says "Nomen est omen". Calling your package
"docindexer" would draw a lot more people. It is hard to justify to a
third party that a project named "nucular" actually does something
useful.

It looks like a great piece of work otherwise. Congrats.

ps. there is a python project named "The Devil Framework", I cringe
every time I hear about it. Nucular is not as bad, but it is close.

 

[aaron.watters]

ps. there is a python project named "The Devil Framework", I cringe
every time I hear about it.Nucularis not as bad, but it is close.

Aw shucks. I thought it was funny. Can't I make fun of
politicians in my open source projects? Besides there is
a great tradition of tounge-in-cheek package names, like
"Cold fusion", for example.

Actually one reason I chose it, is I own nucularOption.com and
also http://nucular.sourceforge.net was available.

too late now. sorry again,
-- Aaron Watters

===
It's humbling to think
that when Mozart was my age
he'd been dead for 10 years.
-- Tom Lehrer

 

[Steven D'Aprano]

It also reminds me of someone we all know, and I wish it didn't.

As the latin proverb says "Nomen est omen". Calling your package
"docindexer" would draw a lot more people. It is hard to justify to a
third party that a project named "nucular" actually does something
useful.

Yeah, like those crappy products "Linux", "Lisp", "Apache", "Windows",
"Java", "Google", "Yahoo" and especially "Python". Can you imagine trying
to tell your boss that you want to use something called "Python" for your
programming project?


*wink*

 

[Robin Becker]

Aw shucks. I thought it was funny. Can't I make fun of
politicians in my open source projects? Besides there is
a great tradition of tounge-in-cheek package names, like
"Cold fusion", for example.
.......

I think it's an excellent name

 

[Grant Edwards]

I think it's an excellent name

And Bush would probably pronounce it "Nuke-lee-ur".

 

[Bill Hamilton]

And Bush would probably pronounce it "Nuke-lee-ur".

I dislike Bush as much as the next guy, but could we please keep
politics off the group?

 

[Istvan Albert]

a great tradition of tounge-in-cheek package names, like
"Cold fusion", for example.

Cold Fusion is a super cool name. Nobody will every think of it as
representing something odd or silly.

too late now. sorry again,

why would it be late? is the future of you own work not worth the time
it takes to rename it? Compared to all the other work it took ... it
is just a mere inconvenience.

All I can say please do yourself a favor rename it. Imagine yourself
in the position of someone who has no idea what the project is about
and try to imagine what kind of thoughts and feelings the name will
conjure. It matters a lot. It is a shame to put yourself at
disadvantage.

Anyway that's all I can say. FWIW the "Devil Framework" guys are
sticking to their name, I think this is something that feels too
personal, people who invent a name will have a hard time accepting
that it is bad.

i.

 

[aaron.watters]

why would it be late? is the future of you own work not worth the time
it takes to rename it? Compared to all the other work it took ... it
is just a mere inconvenience.

From a sourceforge perspective I think it's more than in

inconvenience -- in fact I'm not sure it can be done --
unless I get on the phone with the guys over there and
beg for some special exception or something. [btw, I like
using sourceforge: lot's of neat packaged services; no real
complaints.] The approved http://nucular.sourceforge.net and
I don't think they'll approve another project with the
same description.

....people who invent a name will have a hard time accepting
that it is bad.

Well I'd like people to use the software because they think
it's good. If the name is a problem it's probably only the
first of many reasons they won't want to use it or will not
like it because it doesn't match their preconceptions. But
if there's some way to change the name easily in the next
week or so, I'll consider it anyway. hints?

-- Aaron Watters

===
Why do you hang out with that sadist?
Beats me! -- Kliban

 

[Paul Boddie]

Well I'd like people to use the software because they think
it's good. If the name is a problem it's probably only the
first of many reasons they won't want to use it or will not
like it because it doesn't match their preconceptions.

Please ignore the fuss about the name - I guess you didn't spend the
required three months pre-hyping the project on a blog, thus not
getting "buy in" from the impatient masses - and tell us how the
software compares to stuff like Lucene or Xapian.

Paul

 

[Richie Hindle]

[Paul]

tell us how the software compares to stuff like Lucene or Xapian.

+1

 

[aaron.watters]

On 9 Okt, 22:32, (e-mail address removed) wrote:
...tell us how the [ http://nucular.sourceforge.net ]
software compares to stuff like Lucene or Xapian...

I wish I could, honestly. I've looked briefly into trying
to put together some sort of comparisons, but I find the
documentation for both the systems mentioned quite forbidding.
I certainly don't want to spend as much time developing
comparisons with other projects as I did developing
nucular .

For the moment I will make the completely unbiased
suggestion that nucular indices may be a lot easier
to set up and use than either Lucene or Xapian, particularly
from a Python programming perspective.

It's also not immediately clear to me whether Xapian and
Lucene support completely unrestricted numbers and combinations
of fields, but I'm not sure.

I'll see if I can come up with something better than
that...

As a side note, if you do benchmarks, please don't use
the Lucene benchmark query taken from

http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/benchmarks.html

namely,

Query: +Domain:sos +(+((Name:goo*^2.0 Namelan*^2.0) (Teaser:goo* Tea
serlan*) (Details:goo* Detailslan*)) -Cancel:y) +DisplayStartDate:
[mkwsw2jk0 -mq3dj1uq0] +EndDate:[mq3dj1uq0-ntlxuggw0]

Because I expect nucular will perform very poorly on
this query (since it can't even implement it). I put
a set of query features that I thought was
suitable for most purposes into nucular. Others may appear
in later releases, but the one's that are there cover the
most common needs, I think. I would prefer benchmarks
that compared simple common examples, not obscure
complicated ones.

-- Aaron Watters

===
if you want a friend, get a dog.
-- Truman

 

[Grant Edwards]

I dislike Bush as much as the next guy, but could we please keep
politics off the group?

I say, it's a joke, son!

And there's nothing political about it.

The "joke" is predicated on the incongruity between the
superficial logic of the statement and reality. The
superficial part is the assumption that somebody who swaps two
syllables when pronouncing a word will swap them back when the
word is _spelled_ with them swapped. The reality is that's not
they way language processing works the human brain.

There's also some incongruity in the assumption that George Bush
would be discussing an obscure Python library.

OK, it wasn't _that_ funny, but there wasn't anything even
remotely political about it. I just needed somebody who is
widely know to mis-pronounce nuclear as "nuke-you-lar".

Jimmy Carter would have worked just as well -- a little better,
actually, since he graduated from the Nuclear Engineering
program at the US Naval Acadamy, and the mere fact that he
mispronounces nuclear is sort of incongruous. But, there
probably aren't that many people who remember how Jimmy Carter
pronounced the work nuclear, or that he had a degree in nuclear
engineering.

Anyway, I apologize for my attempt at humor, since it appears
to have somehow offended.

 

[Steve Holden]

No, it doesn't stand for anything. I guess it's not for you .
Sorry about that.

(see the graphic at the bottom of http://nucular.sourceforge.net)

It's a shame the name obscures rather than enlightens. Your stuff is
usually pretty good - I still remember Gadfly fondly.

regards
Steve
--
Steve Holden +1 571 484 6266 +1 800 494 3119
Holden Web LLC/Ltd http://www.holdenweb.com
Skype: holdenweb http://del.icio.us/steve.holden

Sorry, the dog ate my .sigline so I couldn't cat it

 

[aaron.watters]

It's a shame the name obscures rather than enlightens. Your stuff is
usually pretty good - I still remember Gadfly fondly.

Sorry you feel that way about the name, Steve .
I thought it was funny and eye catching.
I'm glad you remember Gadfly (http://gadfly.sourceforge.net).
Still distributed with many packages (including Zope, I think).
Still getting 5-20 downloads a day on sourceforge.
Not bad for a package released back in '94, eh?

-- Aaron Watters

===
The method employed I would gladly explain,
While I have it so clear in my head,
If I had but the time and you had but the brain--
But much yet remains to be said.
-- http://www.xfeedme.com/nucular/gut.py/go?FREETEXT=snark

 

[Istvan Albert]

I still remember Gadfly fondly.

What a great piece of software Gadfly is ... congrats on that Aaron.
For me it was one of the first Python packages that truly stood out
and made me want to learn Python.

i.